Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions — NATIONAL FINANCE

University Places

Mr. Boyden: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer how many applicants with two A level general certificate of education passes were reported by the University Clearing House as having failed to secure a university place this autumn.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Mr. Alan Green): I understand that the University Central Council on Admissions will report on this year's operations early next year. The Council is responsible to the universities, not to the Government.

Mr. Boyden: Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the strictures in the Report of the Robbins Committee about the absence of figures which the Government can use? Will he give an assurance that the collection of this sort of figure will be very much speeded up and, what is more important, will he give an assurance that the thousands of students who have not secured admission will be guaranteed a place in the next year?

Mr. Green: Of course we are interested in these figures when they are produced. I must repeat that this is the responsibility of the universities. The Council is responsible to the universities and not to the Government. I repeat that we await these figures with interest ourselves.

Dr. King: Surely the Minister has some responsibility to the House for the money that he gives to the University Grants Committee? Will he bear in mind that this information is of serious

importance to all who believe in university education?

Mr. Green: Of course it is of importance. I have already accepted that it is. I am sure that the hon. Member will agree that the maintenance of academic freedom is also important, and we must not undermine it in any way.

Universities (Recurrent Grants)

Mr. Swingler: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in view of the recommendations of the Robbins Report, what immediate increase Her Majesty's Government will make in the recurrent grants to universities.

Mr. Green: I would refer the hon. Member to the Answer I gave to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) on 19th November.

Mr. Swingler: When will an announcement be made? Is he aware that the university authorities are anxious to know as rapidly as possible, because of the plans that are necessary if a great expansion in the number of places is to take place next year? Can he say when an announcement will be available about these grants?

Mr. Green: I cannot add to my original Answer. I can say that this is being treated as a matter of the very highest priority.

Local Authority Loans (Interest Rates)

Mr. Swingler: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will now take steps to enable local authorities to obtain loans at lower rates of interest for housing and other socially desirable purposes.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Reginald Maudling): If the suggestion is that local authorities should obtain their loans at subsidised rates of interest, then I could not agree.

Mr. Swingler: Why are the Government prepared to grant loans at specially low rates of interest for some projects—for example, Cunard—but not for the generally desirable projects of promoting as rapid an expansion of housing, school building and other such things as possible? Is it not essential to distinguish between things which


are really urgent and those that are less urgent? Is not one of the most vital things to provide local authorities with the finance to speed up the housing programme?

Mr. Maudling: I think that the hon. Gentleman has failed to recognise that grants to local authorities, which is the way in which we help them, will be over £1,000 million during the current year.

Mr. Frank Allaun: Is the Chancellor of the Exchequer aware that all over the country council tenants, some of them faced with the fourth rent increase in four years, are fighting mad about this and they are blaming their own councils, which are the scapegoats for Government high interest rates? Will the Government reconsider reintroducing the 3 per cent, maximum rate which applied under the Labour Government?

Mr. Maudling: No, Sir. Our assistance to local authorities is very large and is growing. We think that the right way to subsidise local authorities is in this more open way rather than by providing hidden subsidies in the form of artificial rates of interest.

Mr. Swingler: Does not the Chancellor of die Exchequer realise that high interest charges are the greatest obstacle to the expansion of the social services at the moment?

Mr. Maudling: It would appear from the expansion which has taken place in the social services in the last ten years that there have not been very many obstacles.

Education (Public Investment)

Mr. Grimond: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what public investment will be needed in the years 1963–64 and 1964–65, in addition to the estimates set out in Command Paper No. 2177, in order to implement the recommendations of the Robbins and Newsom Committees.

Mr. Maudling: The Government have undertaken to adjust capital grants to university institutions to provide for the expansion of student numbers recommended by the Robbins Committee. The University Grants Committee

and the Education Departments are now discussing the best methods for securing that expansion with the institutions concerned; and decisions about increased investment must await the outcome of those discussions.
Questions about the implementation of the Newsom Committee's Report are, of course, far my right hon. Friend, the Minister of Education; but the right hon. Gentleman will have seen reports of the Minister's speech at Rochdale on 11th November, in which he announced increased cost limits and increased programmes for school building, following the Newsom Report's emphasis on the importance of continuing the policy of improving our secondary schools.

Mr. Grimond: As public investment in education in the latest White Paper is shown as falling in 1964–65 as compared with 1963–64—obviously that figure will have to be revised, in view of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said—may we take it that a full and comprehensive statement about the sums involved and the proposals of the Government will be made as soon as these investigations have been conducted?

Mr. Maudling: There was a note in the White Paper saying that the figures for universities would be revised after discussion. On the general development of education expenditure, I think there is a later Question about White Papers on public expenditure generally.

Nationalised Industries (Profit Targets)

Mr. Grimond: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what are the economic considerations which lie behind the new profit targets laid down for the nationalised industries by the Treasury; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Maudling: I would refer the right hon. Gentleman to the White Paper on the Financial and Economic Obligations of the Nationalised Industries of April, 1961 (Cmnd. 1337), especially paragraphs 15–16 and 19–23, where these considerations are fully set out. Basically the policy is designed to ensure that nationalised industries should earn a return on the capital invested in them


which fully covers the cost of the services they provide and makes an adequate contribution towards the cost of their capital development.

Mr. Grimond: In so far as these figures are an indication of the expansion of certain extremely important industries, may we take it from the right hon. Gentleman that N.E.D.C. was consulted before the latest figures were laid down? Are the latest figures for the electricity industry sufficient in view of the expected and hoped for growth of 4 per cent, in the gross national product?

Mr. Maudling: The actual figures for individual industries would be put to the Ministers concerned. Broadly speaking, these figures are worked out in consultation between the Government and the nationalised industries. I do not think that N.E.D.C. would be concerned in the individual discussions, but clearly the principles involved are matters we have discussed on the Council.

Export of Works of Art (Committee's Report)

Dr. Stross: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will implement the recommendations of the Reviewing Committee on Export of Works of Art in its most recent report; and how soon he will establish the fund of £1 million for this purpose.

Mr. Green: My right hon. Friend has carefully considered the Committee's recommendations but sees serious objections in principle to such a fund. In particular, it would require special legislation which would have the effect of transferring control of this expenditure from this House to a Government Department.

Dr. Stross: I agree that it would be very bad indeed to pass control to a Government Department from the House in any matter whatsoever. Is it not a fact, however, that there are serious advantages as well as disadvantages in this suggestion? Does the Minister remember the difficulties we have from time to time, that the Treasury comes to the rescue on very many occasions, but that there is always a flurry and worry and we never know quite what is to happen?

Mr. Green: I quite see the point the hon. Gentleman is making. I think he will agree—I am glad that he has in effect said so— that the Treasury comes to the rescue on appropriate occasions. I do not think that the system is working too badly. We are keeping in this country and away from export a very substantial amount of the nation's art heritage.

New Universities (Dorset)

Mr. Wingfield Digby: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, when considering proposals for new universities, he will establish a university in Dorset.

Mr. Green: I would refer my hon. Friend to the Answer which my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary gave to the hon. Member for Anglesey (Mr. C. Hughes) on 19th November.

Mr. Digby: I do not know the position in Wales, but is my hon. Friend aware that King Alfred is said to have been educated at Sherborne in Dorest? It can therefore be said that we staked our claim a long time ago.

Mr. Green: I appreciate the historical value of my hon. Friend's remarks.

Furniture Industry

Mr. John Hall: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what proposals he has for stimulating the growth of the furniture industry.

Mr. Green: The steady growth of the economy, which it has been the object of the Government's measures to promote, is the best way of stimulating the growth of industry generally, including the furniture industry. I have been glad to see from recent figures that the level of unemployment in the furniture industry has fallen well below the national average and that the value of orders on hand has increased.

Mr. Hall: Is my hon. Friend aware that, although in September and October there was a welcome increase in the sales of furniture, nevertheless sales for the nine months to date have been rather Jess than they were in the same period last year? Is he not aware that before a house can become a home it must be furnished? In that case would he agree


that to make a reality of the Government's housing programme furniture should be treated as a necessity of life and Purchase Tax removed?

Mr. Green: I do not think that my hon. Friend will expect me to comment on the latter part of his supplementary question at this moment in time. He will be glad to know, in view of the first part of his supplementary question, that orders on hand for the industry in September were the highest monthly figure for a few years at £14.1 million.

Mrs. Slater: While it is appreciated that the hon. Gentleman cannot make a statement about the Budget, may I ask whether he is aware that there have been occasions when Purchase Tax reliefs have been given in between Budgets? In view of the need for people, as the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall) said, to have a home as well as a house, and of what has taken place in the industry, will the Chancellor consider making an early announcement about the removal of Purchase Tax on furniture?

Mr. Green: My right hon. Friend is a man with great capacity for consideration but I do not think that I should set a precedent by saying "Yes" or "No" at Question Time to a supplementary question of this nature.

Cost of Living

Mr. A. Lewis: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer to what extent it is Government policy to reduce the cost of living to its 1951 level, and to restore the purchasing value of the £ sterling to its pre-1951 figure.

Mr. Maudling: It is one of the primary aims of the Government's economic policy to secure greater stability of costs and prices in the future; but it is no part of our policy to return to the situation which existed before 1951 in this or any other matter.

Mr. Lewis: Does not the right hon. Gentleman recollect the promises made by the Conservatives to reduce the cost of living, make the £ worth something and to "mend the hole" in our purses? Is he aware that the £ is now at its lowest level ever in peace or war and

that the cost of living is the highest ever? When are these promises to be redeemed, considering that the Conservatives have been in office for twelve years? Gin he not do something to implement them?

Mr. Maudling: The Question referred to 1951. What I can quite fairly say is that if we were to return to the conditions of 1951 there are few, if any, people who would not be very much worse off.

Mr. H. Hynd: Does not the right hon. Gentleman remember the criterion laid down by the leaders of his party—that a Government will be judged by the effect of their policy on prices and the value of the £?

Mr. Maudling: I think that the Government will be judged on this occasion by the effect on the standard of living of the people, and we are happy to be judged on that.

Local Authorities, Scotland (Stamp Duty)

Mr. Bence: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what was the amount collected in Stamp Duty from local authorities in Scotland in 1962–63; and if he will abolish these duties.

Mr. Green: I regret that the figure is not available. As regards the latter part of the question, the hon. Member will not expect me to deal with such matters at this time of year.

Mr. Bence: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that I am rather surprised that he cannot give the figure of the amount collected in Scotland? My information is that there has been a terrific expenditure by local authorities there on Stamp Duty. Will he take steps to see that this burden is removed?

Mr. Green: I cannot give the figure because the receipts are not generally divided up according to the class of person from whom they are collected. The hon. Gentleman will recollect that, in 1953, we gave a special concession to local authorities by reducing the percentage from 2 to 1. When the general percentage came down that figure was kept at the same level.

Post-war Credits (Disabled Ex-Service Men)

Mr. D. Griffiths: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he will pay post-war credits to disabled ex-Service men; and what amount of money is involved.

Mr. Green: Disabled ex-Service men receiving a 100 per cent, disability pension can obtain payment of their post-war credits if they have not already claimed them. To pay credits to all disabled ex-Service men would cost about £1 million but I am afraid that I cannot see my way to make this special release.

Mr. Griffiths: In view of the expenditure the Government have promised for the future, this sum would not be equivalent to losing a button off the Chancellor's shirt. Is it not time that these men— and in some cases women—who are suffering under certain circumstances were paid their money?

Mr. Green: I agree that the amount is not great, but I am sure that the hon. Member will appreciate that there are plenty of other classes which could really lay claim to exactly equal treatment. This is not, therefore, merely a question of one particular class of person.

Mr. Houghton: What steps are taken to bring to the notice of the 100 per cent, disabled their right to claim post-war credits? I have had letters from a number of disabled people saying that they have never heard of this.

Mr. Green: There have been the usual announcements and forms of advertisement, including Questions in the House. We will certainly see if there is any need for, or evidence that would require, any stepping up of the advertisement.

Ice Cream, Soft Drinks and Sweets (Purchase Tax)

Mr. Milne: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what is his policy in regard to the tax on ice cream, soft drinks and sweets.

Mr. Maudling: Representations about the effects of the 15 per cent. Purchase Tax are being made to me by the industries concerned. I will give these careful consideration but I cannot anticipate my decision.

Mr. Milne: Will the right hon. Gentleman look into a number of factors of this matter? The tax in itself has never been a justifiable one in any case. It has contributed to unemployment in many areas and to falling off of demand. Quite a number of manufacturers have sheltered behind it in order to cloak price increases, including altering the size of the commodities. The matter needs very careful examination. When the Chancellor introduced this tax various reasons were given. In view of the professed prosperity he is now preaching, cannot he deal with this more expeditiously?

Mr. Maudling: I will consider any representations on the subject, particularly from hon. Members.

Mr. Bossom: Will my right hon. Friend also bear in mind the hardship that this tax of 15 per cent.—

Mr. A. Lewis: The hon. Member voted for it.

Mr. Bossom: No, I did not—on blackcurrant juice is causing the horticultural industry?

Mr. Maudling: I think my hon. Friend will recognise that I am prepared at all times to consider representations on this and similar points but that equally I am not prepared to anticipate any decision I may take.

Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Newcastle

Mr. Milne: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will open a branch of Her Majesty's Stationery Office in Newcastle.

Mr. Green: Her Majesty's Stationery Office already has a branch at Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the work which can efficiently and economically be undertaken there.

Mr. Milne: While in some respects the North-East leads the country, will the hon. Gentleman see that we are given an opportunity on this occasion of not lagging behind? An extension of such facilities would be greatly welcomed.

Mr. Green: I can assure the hon. Gentleman that particularly in view of the plans of the Government for the


North-East, any new possibilities will be examined in the field covered by the Question.

Bicycles (Purchase Tax)

Mr. Tapsell: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether, in view of declining home sales, he will reduce the Purchase Tax on bicycles.

Mr. Maudling: I would refer my hon. Friend to the Answer which my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary gave on 26th November to the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Whitlock).

Mr. Tapsell: While considering this matter, as my right hon. Friend said he would in that Answer, may I ask whether he will bear three considerations in mind? First, there is the considerable contribution which the bicycle industry makes to our exports and the fact that this continued contribution depends on a prosperous home market, co where sales have fallen by 50 per cent, since 1955. Secondly, 90 per cent, of all bicycles exported, at a value of £ 26 million last year, were manufactured in my constituency and the nearly 10,000 workers in the industry are very concerned about their future if the decline of home sales continues. Thirdly, action is required before the Budget.

Mr. Maudling: I will take note of what my hon. Friend says.

Mr. W. Clark: Will my right hon. Friend also remember that if it is fair and right to give a reduction in Purchase Tax to the motor industry because of a good export record, the same principle could be applied to the bicycle industry which, as I am sure he will an agree, has a first-class export record? Will he look at it in that light?

Mr. Maudling: I will do so, but that is a slightly hypothetical question.

Dual-purpose Engines (Rebated Fuel)

Mr. Iremonger: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will set up a working party to consider a procedure whereby rebated fuel may be used, with suitable mechanical safeguards, in dual-purpose engines while stationary; and if he will undertake to amend the Finance Act, 1959, accordingly.

Mr. Maudling: We have already looked at this matter very carefully, view of the fundamental difficulties principle involved, I do not think any useful purpose would be served in setting up a working party. I certainly mot undertake an amendment of the law.

Mr. Iremonger: Will my right hon. Friend look at this again in the light of the fact that, as he knows, the British Ferro-Concrete Association has perfected a device which should protect the venue and it seems unfair on the association that it should be penalised because other people have not perfected similar device?

Mr. Maudling: This is a very difficult point and I think that we are right in the line we are taking. But I will gladly look at thin in the light of what my hon. friend says, although without any commitment.

Tax Avoidance

Mr. Houghton: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what steps he eposes to take to check the type of tax avoidance disclosed in the case of Petrotim Securities Limited v. Ayres (Inspector of Taxes) heard before the Court of Appeal on 12th November, 1963, and in the case of Leibigs Extract of Meat Company Limited and the Sudan Meat Products Limited, details which have been sent to him.

Mr. Green: I do not consider that any special steps are necessary. In the case of Petrotim Securities the Court of Appeal held that the attempted avoidance of tax failed. The hon. Member will appreciate that I cannot say anything about the other companies mentioned in the Question.

Mr. Houghton: How can the hon. Gentleman be satisfied with the existing powers of the Inland Revenue to stop this kind of tax avoidance when, in case of Petrotim Securities Ltd. it took a High Court action to stop it, and in the case of Leibigs Extract Meat Co., Ltd., it took an informer to stop it?
In the former case, marketable Securities were sold by the principal company to a subsidiary. Those securities, worth £800,000, were sold for


£200,000 in order to make an artificial loss of £600,000. In the case of Leibigs Extract of Meat Co. a manipulation of stock valuation—[Interruption.]—I take full responsibility for what I am saying—[HON. MEMBERS: "Question."] I have the evidence here.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I do not question the hon. Gentleman's responsibility but this is Question Time. May we have his question?

Mr. Houghton: I am pressing the point upon the hon. Gentleman as to how he can be satisfied with existing powers when this kind of tax avoidance can go unchecked unless there are special circumstances which brings it to light. The manipulation of the valuation of stocks and marketable securities—[HON. MEMBERS: "Question."]—has led to the avoidance of revenue. What has the hon. Gentleman to say about it?

Mr. Green: As I told the hon. Gentleman, I quite understand his concern, which I share. But, as I have also said, in the case of Petrotim Securities the attempt to avoid tax failed. The point was taken by the inspector, and inspectors do scrutinise carefully, as the hon. Gentleman knows, any cases where an attempt is made to get relief from an artificial loss. In response to the first part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question, I am sure that he would not wish me to destroy or weaken the machinery of appeal which the taxpayers properly have from decisions of the inspectors.

Mr. Houghton: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. In view of the grossly unsatisfactory nature of the reply, I beg to give notice that I shall raise this matter on the Adjournment at the earliest possible opportunity.

Mr. Houghton: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he proposes to institute proceedings against, or recover penalties from, Mr. Robert Frederick Soul in respect of false statements made for the purpose of avoiding income tax as disclosed in the proceedings before the Court of Appeal (Soul v. Irving (Inspector of Taxes)) on 18th November, 1963.

Mr. Green: The individual in question was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in November, 1960, on charges based on the taxation matters to which the hon. Member refers.

Mr. Houghton: I am obliged for that information, which did not emerge in the report of the proceedings before the Court of Appeal on a dispute on tax liability. Will the hon. Gentleman ask his right hon. Friend to consider reaffirming the doctrine of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer twenty years ago, to the effect that the Board of Inland Revenue is not composed of moralists but of tax gatherers and that much delinquency, "fiddles" and "twists" could be compounded for a money price if only the culprits would learn to stop lying and begin to tell the truth? Then we may have more room in our prisons for the type of man who this week was sentenced to three months for stealing a bottle of whisky.

Mr. Green: I do not think that any further answer is called for from me.

Taxation

Mr. O'Malley: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will recommend the establishment of a Royal Commission to examine the present system of taxation, and particularly to inquire into the relationship between tax reform and economic growth.

Mr. Maudling: No, Sir.

Mr. O'Malley: Would not the hon. Gentleman agree that an equitable tax system is a prerequisite of any national incomes policy? Would he also agree that if an incomes policy is to work it must be seen by the public to operate effectively and impartially? Is he further aware that there has been great dissatisfaction over the last few years with the way the Tory Government's so-called incomes policy has operated—[HON. MEMBERS: "Reading."] Would he agree that any effective incomes policy must include a proper capital gains tax and a proper assessment of expense account allowances? Will he look at this again? [Interruption.] May I also ask him why my Question has been transferred to him from the Prime Minister? Is the Prime Minister ducking this kind of Question?

Mr. Maudling: As far as I understand them, I am inclined to agree with the first two points but disagree with the last.

Parking Meter Revenue (Tax)

Mr. Clive Bossom: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will introduce legislation to exempt local authorities from paying taxes on the revenue from parking meters.

Mr. Green: No, Sir.

Mr. Bossom: Would not my hon. Friend agree that some local authorities are not disclosing the actual net revenue from meters and are diverting money from the original purpose, which is to help off-street parking, and that instead this money is indirectly going to help subsidise such things as public libraries and public lavatories? Is this really fair to the motorist?

Mr. Green: I was asked orginally if we would introduce legislation to exempt local authorities from paying tax on the revenue from parking meters. I have to say no, because local authorities are liable to Income Tax on their trading profits like anyone else. I hope that my hon. Friend is not accusing them of evasion.

Redundant Employees (Severance Payments)

Mr. A. Roberts: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he will give tax relief to industrial concerns prepared to introduce generous severance payments to redundant employees.

Mr. Maudling: Severance payments made to redundant employees by an employer who continued in business would normally be deductible in computing his profits for tax purposes for the period in which the payments were made.

Mr. Roberts: Does the Chancellor agree that it would be far better for all concerned to put the money away to meet any contingency of redundancy when they are enjoying good times than to ask employers to provide severance pay when they are going through depressing times? Would he not agree that if such a fund were put on one side, under the control of workers and employers, it would be of advan-

tage and would give confidence to the workers and that, to some extent, the Government would be relieved of a certain amount of obligation?

Mr. Maudling: That is certainly an interesting suggestion worth examining, but the hon. Member will not expect me to express any opinion on that any more than on any other tax change.

Private Toll Bridges

Mr. W. Hamilton: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he is yet in a position to make a statement concerning the continuing existence of toll bridges in private hands, the proceds from which have escaped taxation in some cases for hundreds of years; and in view of the declared intention of Her Majesty's Government to impose an incomes policy, whether he will now treat this question as a matter of urgency.

Mr. Green: I regret that I am not yet in a position to make a statement.

Mr. Hamilton: Does the hon. Gentleman recollect that this matter was first raised in the House in March, 1962, when examples were given from that side of the House of toll bridges, one bringing in an income of £6,000 a year tax-free and another, held by a functionary of the Tory Party, bringing in as much as £70,000 a year tax-free? Is he aware that the first example has continued since 1766, the Earls of Abingdon receiving this tax-free income for 200 years? Is the hon. Gentleman further aware that I asked a Question and inquired whether this would be looked into as long ago as May, 1962, and he then said that it was under review. When shall we have some results?

Mr. Green: I am sorry, but I cannot say more than I have said so far. [HON. MEMBERS: "Why?"] It is slightly more complicated in fact than it appears on the surface. All I can tell the hon. Member is that it is not lost sight of.

Mr. Paget: Can the hon. Gentleman tell us why a toll bridge is tax-free and a parking meter is taxed?

Mr. Green: In this case there is a certain amount of history to the matter.

Hon. Members: Mystery.

Gaming In Clubs (Advertisements)

Mr. Boyden: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what were the costs of the Customs and Excise advertisements of August, 1963, announcing details for the registration of gaming in clubs; and for what reasons were pictures of eighteenth century gaming clubs included in the advertisements.

Mr. Maudling: The cost was £21,920. The picture was included to attract interest and attention to the letter-press, and it seems to have succeeded.

Mr. Boyden: Is this the right hon. Gentleman's contribution to the Government's modernisation plan? Is it the Government's policy to encourage gambling and dress it up in eighteenth century aristocratic trappings?

Mr. Maudling: With respect, that is a pretty feeble supplementary question. The House agreed that we should acquire information about gambling and gaming. We therefore placed an obligation on a very large number of people to register what they were doing, and we thought it right to use every means we could to let people know what their new obligations were.

Mr. Boyden: Would it not have been better to have spent at least half that money on advertising disabled people's entitlement to post-war credits to which my hon. Friends have just referred?

Mr. Maudling: No, because half the money would not have achieved our purpose.

Post-War Credits (Emigrants)

Mrs. Braddock: asked the Secretary to the Treasury whether he will arrange to repay post-war credits in cases where a citizen intends to emigrate and where he has been accepted by the country to which he desires to go.

Mr. Green: No, Sir.

Mrs. Braddock: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that in some of these cases the post-war credit has been denied to younger people who have not been able to claim because of the age of the person who had passed away? Would it not be better to give them the opportunity to use this money rather than

that it should be left for the length of time it may need to be left before they can claim?

Mr. Green: I appreciate the hon. Lady's concern about this. I accept that this is a difficult matter but we laid down certain classes of persons falling within certain categories of hardship to whom early repayment can be made and is made. I do not think that I can regard an intention to emigrate as affording sufficient ground for preferential treatment.

Sir J. Langford-Holt: Bearing in mind that these are debts which the Government have owed to citizens for twenty years, may I ask whether my hon. Friend is still looking actively for new categories to whom repayment can be made at the earliest opportunity?

Mr. Green: My hon. Friend will appreciate that we have debated this in the House many times before and that it is difficult to introduce a new category that can hold water, so to speak, against all others, but a steady and quite rapid reduction in the total amount of postwar credit outstanding has of course been made.

Commonwealth Students' Personal Belongings (Import Duty)

Mr. B. Harrison: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether students entering the United Kingdom from the Commonwealth pay duty on a personal belonging such as a watch.

Mr. Maudling: No, Sir, provided the article is properly declared and is for the student's continuing personal use.

Mr. Harrison: In view of my right hon. Friend's Answer, may I ask whether he will consider refunding the duty charged to a Rhodes Scholar on an inscribed gold watch when he came to take up his scholarship at Oxford?

Mr. Maudling: I would be happy to consider any individual case if my hon. Friend will send me details of it.

Seaside Properties (Rating Valuation)

Mr. Bullard: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will instruct valuation officers, in determining the assessments of properties in seaside towns


and villages, to make a distinction between properties in genuine and continuous residential use and those used for casual weekend and holiday purposes.

Mr. Maudling: No, Sir. Valuation officers are required by law to value residential properties of all kinds according to the rentals at which they might be expected to let.

Mr. Bullard: Will my right hon. Friend look at this Question again? In the minds of people who have to live in these seaside towns and villages there is a great distinction between regular and continuous use and use made by people who can well afford to live in these houses just for holiday purposes. Will my right hon. Friend make inquiries and see whether some allowance cannot be made to these people who do not want to go through all the business of appeal and whose claim I consider is very just?

Mr. Maudling: That would be very difficult. This is part of the basic law on valuation which Parliament has laid down, and the valuation officers must carry out their legal duties.

Commonwealth (Economic Survey)

Mr. P. Williams: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what action he is taking to follow up his suggestion at the recent meeting of the Commonwealth Economic Consultative Council that a forward-looking economic survey of the Commonwealth should be conducted.

Mr. Maudling: I am considering a further approach to Commonwealth Governments.

Mr. Williams: Will my right hon. Friend understand that a great number of us welcome this initiative being carried into effect? This has been talked about for far too long. What we look for is action.

Mr. Maudling: It is a question of obtaining Commonwealth agreement. We made a proposal. Other Commonwealth Governments are considering it, and we are thinking of a further approach.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: Is not my hon. Friend's suggestion relevant to the proposal made by my right hon. Friend

the Minister of Public Building and Works for a Commonwealth economic secretariat? How are Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom getting on with that?

Mr. Maudling: I do not think that that is quite on all fours. On the whole, in the past Commonwealth countries have not been altogether keen on the idea of a Commonwealth secretariat.

Charitable and Educational Organisations (Covenants)

Mr. B. Harrison: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if, under his regulations, the taxation concessions for gifts given to charitable and educational organisations under seven-year covenants apply similarly to such organisations in the Commonwealth.

Mr. Green: No, Sir. The courts have held that the tax reliefs provided for charities apply only to organisations established in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Harrison: In view of the desirable nature of such trusts outside this country and in the Commonwealth, would my hon. Friend consider this when the next Budget comes up?

Mr. Green: If my hon. Friend has a particular organisation in mind, may I invite him in return to see me about it?

The Late Guy Burgess

Mr. A. Lewis: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will ensure that no moneys or bequests from the late Guy Burgess are transmitted to Moscow to Mr. Kim Philby.

Mr. Maudling: No, Sir. The late Guy Burgess was non-resident for the purposes of Exchange Control. Under the normal rules, any assets of his estate in this country are freely transferable to any other country.

Mr. Lewis: Is not the Chancellor aware that most people would think it very wrong for currency to go out of the country to this particular individual?

Mr. Maudling: In the first place, the currency is already out because he was non-resident. In the second place, I think that it is absolutely wrong for the Government to use powers given to them for one purpose for a quite different purpose.

National Debt Commissioners

Mr. Mitchison: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer when the National Debt Commissioners last met.

Mr. Maudling: On 12th October, 1860.

National Insurance (Reserve) Fund

Mr. Mitchison: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what is the total and the percentage depreciation since date of purchase of the securities purchased since 1st April, 1962, and held, at the latest convenient date, in the National Insurance (Reserve) Fund by the National Debt Commissioners; and what steps it is proposed to take to obviate any further depreciation.

Mr. Maudling: The total depreciation in the securities purchased since 1st April, 1962, was £262,000 on 27th November. This represents 0.367 per cent, of the cost price. A loss of this order is quite possible from price movements in a single day and is, therefore, within the normal margin of fluctuation. The last part of the Question does not, therefore, arise.

Mr. Mitchison: Is not this the last stage of the continuing depreciation of this Fund, and ought not the National Debt Commissioners to have met and done something about it or, failing that, ought not the Fund to have been passed to people who would look after it and have full powers of investment?

Mr. Maudling: I doubt if that would add anything to the wealth of the nation or the benefit of the contributors.

Halfpennies

Mr. Lipton: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much it costs to mint one halfpenny.

Mr. Green: The Mint's foreign competitor's do not reveal their production costs and I do not, therefore, think that it would be right to expect the Mint to reveal its.

Mr. Lipton: Is it not surprising that the Minister thinks that there is some danger of competition in the manufacture of halfpennies in foreign countries? Would it be right to assume that the cost of manufacturing the halfpenny is more

than a halfpenny and that, therefore, this operation is a dead loss for the Royal Mint?

Mr. Green: The hon. Gentleman will have to draw his own conclusions from the Answer I have given.

Mr. Rankin: Would it be right to reveal the cost of printing the £1 note?

Mr. Green: What I have said about the Royal Mint relates in exactly the same way to currency notes.

Post-War Credits (Unemployment)

Dr. Bray: asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer whether he will make the repayment of post-war credits dependent on cumulative and not continuous unemployment for six months.

Mr. Green: The present requirement of 26 weeks' continuous unemployment is subject to the modification that intervals up to a total of six days, excluding Sundays, are disregarded, but I do not think that there is sufficient reason for dealing with intermittent unemployment in the way suggested.

Dr. Bray: Is the Minister aware that in areas of high unemployment chronic unemployment for periods greatly in excess of six months is a very common experience and that his local offices have even advised men to stay off work in order to qualify for the last few weeks of their qualifying period?

Mr. Green: I should like to consider the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question; it sounded rather serious to me. He will appreciate that persons receiving National Assistance, in other words, those who prima facie have the greatest need, have only to meet a qualifying period of 12 weeks, not 26.

Sir J. Langford-Holt: Again on the question of post-war credits, will my hon. Friend bear in mind that there was a specific promise given in the House by a Chancellor of the Exchequer that they would be paid after the war? Does he realise that, flowing from that undertaking, it is for him to produce reasons why specific categories should not be paid rather than the reverse?

Mr. Green: I have already tried to assure my hon. Friend that that is precisely what we seek to do, but it is very


difficult, as both sides of the House have found, to produce a category which is absolutely clear and which does not put upon the Inland Revenue, which has no means of making this kind of hardship evaluation itself, an almost impossible task of judgment.

Oral Answers to Questions — SOCIAL SECURITY

Mr. Wade: asked the Prime Minister what consideration he has given to the amalgamation of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance with the National Assistance Board to form a single Ministry of Social Security.

The Prime Minister (Sir Alec Douglas-Home): I am aware that this proposition has some attraction, but the issues involved are not so simple as the Question suggests. However, I do not regard the present arrangements in this area of Government as necessarily right for all time.

Mr. Wade: I am not sure whether that means "Yes" or "No". Is the Prime Minister aware that there are still many people who are reluctant to go to the National Assistance Board, though that is no criticism of the staff of the Board? In any case, is it not high time that we had some radical reform of our social security system, and might not this be coupled with the creation of a single Ministry of Social Security?

The Prime Minister: Like the hon. Gentleman, I am very concerned to avoid any suggestion that stigma attaches to National Assistance, and I am very glad to note the tribute which he paid to the staff of the Board. This is a matter for the machinery of Government which we ought to keep under review.

Mr. P. Williams: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there might well be opportunities for savings and for greater convenience if the local offices of these two organs of Government could be combined?

The Prime Minister: That is one of the considerations which we must take into account when reviewing the machinery of Government.

Mr. Lipton: May we take it nevertheless that the Prime Minister still intends to make the statement on pensions which we were promised by his predecessor on 1st October last?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir, but that hardly arises on this Question.

Oral Answers to Questions — ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (REGIONAL PLANS)

Mr. Wade: asked the Prime Minister which Minister is responsible for relating regional plans to the National Economic Development Council's overall plan for the country.

The Prime Minister: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development, who is a member of the National Economic Development Council, is responsible for ensuring that regional plans are properly related to national economic policies.

Mr. Wade: Is it not the fact that the N.E.D.C. is to set up regional industrial committees? What is to be the link between these committees and the regional planning of the Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development? Would it not simplify matters if the Minister responsible for regional development were chairman of the N.E.D.C? In any case, who is responsible for regional targets for economic growth?

The Prime Minister: My right hon. Friend, of course, sits on the N.E.D.C. and he is, therefore, able to relate these policies to those of the Council.

Mr. Wade: But who co-ordinates all this?

The Prime Minister: I should have thought that his presence there ensured co-ordination.

Oral Answers to Questions — SOUTHERN RHODESIA

Mr. J. Hynd: asked the Prime Minister if he will seek toconvene a meeting of Commonwealth Prime Ministers for the purpose of discussing the question of Southern Rhodesia.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir.

Mr. Hynd: Has the Prime Minister noted that his right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer is consulting the Commonwealth on economic matters? Why should not the Commonwealth be consulted on political matters, particularly on one of such major importance as this and one which is becoming highly dangerous in view of the threats which have been made of precipitate action for independence before the Constitution is settled?

The Prime Minister: The Question dealt not with consultation but with calling a conference of Prime Ministers for a particular purpose.

Mr. Bottomley: Is the Prime Minister aware that, when I suggested in the debate on the Queen's Speech that there should be a meeting of Commonwealth Prime Ministers to discuss this matter, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations said that this was worth considering and suggested that he might put the proposition to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers? Has nothing been done about that?

The Prime Minister: The right hon. Gentleman knows that my right hon. Friend is in touch with the Commonwealth Prime Ministers and others on this, but the Question referred to a Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference called for this purpose. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, when a new member is admitted to the Commonwealth, this question or questions like it appear on the agenda.

Mr. Wall: Will my right hon. Friend agree that, while members of the Commonwealth have every right to be consulted about membership, the matter of independence is wholly one between Her Majesty's Government here and the Commonwealth country concerned?

Mr. H. Wilson: While it is probably wrong to call a special meeting of Commonwealth Prime Ministers for one subject, will not the Prime Minister agree that the time is well overdue now for a conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers to discuss Commonwealth trade and economic development, in view of the shock to the Commonwealth of this Government's Common Market policy and the very serious conference held in September, 1962? Would it not be pos-

sible at such a conference to consider this among a number of other issues?

The Prime Minister: It might be so. I do not know what the timing of a Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conference might be. It is for all the Prime Ministers to decide whether, or when, they hold a conference. This might be or might not be on such an agenda. I cannot tell.

Mr. Wilson: Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us clearly whether he has taken the initiative, since he became Prime Minister, in discussions with the Commonwealth with a view to holding an early meeting of Commonwealth Prime Ministers?

The Prime Minister: When I think that the time is right to take an initiative, I shall take it.

Oral Answers to Questions — HOUSE OF LORDS

Mr. Loughlin: asked the Prime Minister if he will introduce legislation during the lifetime of this Parliament for the abolition of the House of Lords.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir.

Mr. Loughlin: Why not? Has not the right hon. Gentleman himself shown scant regard for the hereditary principle and for the other place? Is it not farcical that he himself should come here and that we should promote a Member of this House to the other place in order to enable Mr. Hogg to get a safe seat to come here? Is it not time that we got rid of this Gilbert and Sullivan situation?

The Prime Minister: I think that there is general appreciation in the country that the House of Lords is necessary and valuable. As far as my own experience goes, this is a case in which absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop: Has my right hon. Friend advised Her Majesty to confer a peerage on the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, or is there, perhaps, some other reason for his absence?

Mr. Shinwell: If the right hon. Gentleman regards the other place as so valuable, why did he leave it? Does he not agree that, now that he has left it, it is much weaker than it was? Therefore, what is the use of retaining it?

The Prime Minister: I have never believed in the doctrine of indispensability. There are plenty of good people in another place.

Oral Answers to Questions — POLITICAL HONOURS SCRUTINY COMMITTEE

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Prime Minister when the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee last met.

The Prime Minister: On 26th November.

Mr. Hughes: Did the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee, on this occasion, scrutinise the case of the well-known footballer who was sent to the House of Lords, presumably, to strengthen the House of Lords Rugby football team? Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that it is an abuse of the political honours system to use the House of Lords in order to transfer someone there from this place in order to provide a safe seat for somebody from the other place who wants to come here?

Mr. Speaker: The second part of that supplementary question is in order. The first part is not.

The Prime Minister: The Question was a very simple one, asking when the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee last met. I have answered it. There is nothing I can add.

Oral Answers to Questions — CANCER RESEARCH (FRENCH PROPOSAL)

Mr. K. Robinson: asked the Prime Minister whether he is aware of the proposal endorsed by President de Gaulle that an international cancer institute should be established jointly by Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union and financed by contributions from each nation amounting to one-half of one per cent, of its defence budget; and if he will endorse the proposal himself.

Sir C. Taylor: asked the Prime Minister what decision has been reached by Her Majesty's Government regarding the policy proposal put forward by President de Gaulle that a small proportion of the armaments expenditure of

the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation countries should be contributed to cancer research.

The Prime Minister: My right hon. Friend the Minister of Health has received a letter from his French colleague outlining this proposal. I understand the letter was also sent to Ministers in the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Federal Republic of Germany and Italy. We will certainly consider this proposal most carefully, and in this we shall be helped by discussions between officials to be held in Paris later this month.

Mr. Robinson: Is not this a most imaginative proposal for international co-operation? Will the Prime Minister say, at least, that, if the other countries to which the invitation has been addressed consent to the setting up of the fund and financing it with ½ Per cent, of the defence budget, Great Britain will not stand out?

The Prime Minister: I should like to see what the plan is and exactly how it might be financed. Certainly, we are sympathetic to the idea.

Sir C. Taylor: Can my right hon. Friend say when he expects that a decision will be made?

The Prime Minister: Not until after the-[HON. MEMBERS: "The election."]—not until after the officials have met in Paris, which, I think, will be before the General Election.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: Will my right hon. Friend consider whether this imaginative proposal could be discussed not only with the continental European countries concerned but with the other members of the Commonwealth in order to see whether they might be willing also to consider it?

The Prime Minister: Only certain countries have so far been invited to meet in Paris, but I will consider my hon. Friend's suggestion.

Mr. H. Wilson: Is the Prime Minister aware that, in spite of the interjection he has just had, this is a matter that goes quite beyond all party considerations and, indeed, should go beyond all national considerations? It is a highly


imaginative proposal, and any action the Government can take in active and warm support of it will be welcomed and actively supported by all parties in the House.

The Prime Minister: I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman.

Oral Answers to Questions — NUCLEAR TESTS

Mr. Driberg: asked the Prime Minister what steps he is taking, in consultation with the heads of other Governments concerned, to extend and reinforce the partial nuclear test-ban agreement.

The Prime Minister: We shall continue to work at the Geneva Disarmament Conference for a comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We pledged ourselves to do this in the Test Ban Treaty signed at Moscow, and we voted for a Resolution in this sense in the United Nations General Assembly on 27th November.

Mr. Driberg: While it is appreciated that, in the present sad circumstances, the Prime Minister cannot have had any detailed conversation yet with the new American President, does the right hon. Gentleman realise that there is a certain urgency about this matter, both as regards making the ban comprehensive and also as regards getting the signatures of other nations to it, particularly the signature of France?

The Prime Minister: Yes, Sir. I did make a suggestion to Mr. Gromyko when I was Foreign Secretary— and hoped that it would be taken up—that the Soviet, British and American scientists should get together to consider these matters. The suggestion was rejected at the time, but I still hope that it might be a fruitful move.

Oral Answers to Questions — SOUTH PACIFIC (FRENCH NUCLEAR TESTS)

Mr. Driberg: asked the Prime Minister if he is aware that the health of the people of the Cook Islands and other British territories may be endangered by French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific; what consultations on this subject there have been between Her Majesty's Gov-

ernment in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Governments; and if, in view of the facts on increased radioactive contamination in the Pacific area disclosed by the leader of the New Zealand delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations, he will make urgent representations on this matter to President De Gaulle.

The Prime Minister: The Cook Islands are a dependency of New Zealand. The Australian and New Zealand Governments have made known to the British Government their concern about this matter. The French Government were made fully aware last summer of our hope that they would adhere to the Test Ban Treaty. We will seek discussions with the French Government at an appropriate time about any health hazards to the population of British territories in the Pacific.

Mr. Driberg: Does that Answer mean that the French Government will or will not proceed with these tests in the Pacific? And has the right hon. Gentleman read the very cogent speech made by the leader of the New Zealand delegation to the United Nations on 18th October? Also, is there not a certain irony in the contrast between the admirable proposal referred to in Question No. Q7 and the fact that if these tests take place they will, presumably, infect an incalculable number of innocent people with cancer?

The Prime Minister: I cannot, of course, answer for the French Government as to whether or not they will test. All I can say is that we will get in touch with the French Government, if it seems that they intend to test, about these matters concerning the health of the people.

Oral Answers to Questions — PEERS (RENUNCIATION OF TITLE)

Mr. Emrys Hughes: asked the Prime Minister if he will introduce legislation to enact that peers renouncing their titles should at the same time renounce estates granted them by the Crown.

The Prime Minister: No, Sir. If by any chance die hon. Gentleman is referring to me, the last contact on these


matters I had with the Crown was with the wife of James IV in 1435, when I became her tenant.

Mr. Hughes: Will the Prime Minister tell us whether he still retains the land resulting from this transaction? Is he aware that there is a precedent in the case of the Earl of Ross, who not only gave up his earldom but gave up his land as well? Does not the right hon. Gentleman think that legislation of this kind would be useful as a deterrent to Lord Salisbury's coming here?

The Prime Minister: I should doubt whether there was any temptation to the noble Marquess to come here but, for myself, I must have been a good tenant for all these years, and fulfilled the 1947 and 1957 Acts, because I have never been evicted by the Crown.

Mr. W. Hamilton: Can the Prime Minister say how many acres he owns by virtue of that experience, and what is the rent income from them?

The Prime Minister: No, Sir. I doubt whether it would profit either the hon. Gentleman or myself to put down Questions about our private affairs.

Mr. P. Williams: Is my right hon. Friend aware that there are a great number of us on this side who are quite satisfied with his tenancy of his present position?

AFTER-CARE (ADVISORY COUNCIL'S REPORT)

The following Question stood upon the Order Paper:

70. Sir D. GLOVER: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department whether he has completed his consideration of the report on the organisation of after-care made by his advisory council on the treatment of offenders; and whether he will make a statement.

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Henry Brooke): With your permission Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I will now answer Question No. 70.
Yes, Sir. I have for some time been convinced that an essential part of the campaign against crime must be a more systematic development of after-care, to

help those discharged from prisons and other establishments to withstand the temptation to revert to crime.
The Government accordingly welcome the valuable study on the Organisation of After-Care made by the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders, and accepts in principle its recommendations, including its emphasis on the continuing need for voluntary effort as well.
On some specific matters arising from the Report I want to consult further those particularly concerned.

Sir D. Glover: Whilst warmly congratulating my right hon. Friend on his announcement, may I ask him to make it quite clear whether he has in mind a new statutory scheme, or intends to tie the statutory arrangements with the voluntary organisations?

Mr. Brooke: Legislation will, of course, be needed to implement fully the recommendations in the Report, but a great deal of progress can be made in advance of legislation. As the Report makes clear, everything depends on the recruitment and training of suitable staff. In addition, voluntary help will be essential to bring about the success of the scheme, and I should like to express my thanks to all those who, over the years, in voluntary capacities and in the voluntary organisations, have given so much devoted service here. I greatly hope that they will find fresh opportunities under the new structure.

Miss Bacon: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that I find it very interesting that he should answer this Question by his hon. Friend on this day in this way when he found it impossible to answer a similar Question I put to him just over a week ago? Is he aware that we shall a wait with interest to discover what parts of the Report he intends to accept? As he says, the training of social workers is of the utmost importance. Is he aware that if these recommendations are to be carried out we shall need far more tranied social workers? Can he tell us what steps he is taking to see that these social workers will be trained?

Mr. Brooke: In reply to the first part of the hon. Lady's supplementary question, I was not in a position, 11 days ago, to give her an answer, otherwise I


can assure her that I would have done so. These things do not depend on the Home Secretary alone; he has to have consultations both inside and outside the Government. I entirely agree with what the hon. Lady says about the importance of training. If she will study afresh the recommendations of the Report she will see the considerable attention it gives to the various steps that would need to be taken to secure sufficient trained social workers in prisons, and also sufficient probation and after-care workers.

Mr. Dance: Would my right hon. Friend agree that it is also vitally important to give some training to the prisoners themselves? This has been done in certain circumstances in the prisons, where certain firms have set up small workshops in which these men are trained and, in many cases, are employed by the firms after release from prison.

Mr. Brooke: We have, of course, the hostel system whereby prisoners, towards the end of long sentences, while living inside a prison in a hostel, go out to work for private employers on ordinary terms. That is a very important development. I think it even more important to try to get the workshop space in prisons extended, so that we can secure for all prisoners something much more like a full working week in prison than is possible at present.

Mr. MacDermot: I welcome the Home Secretary's suggestion, but is he aware that probably the greatest problem in after-care is finding employment for the discharged prisoner? Will he consult those Government Departments that are themselves employing authorities, and the Departments responsible for nationalised industries, to see whether they cannot give a lead in this matter instead of leaving it to private employers? Is he aware of the very strong criticisms that have been made in the courts in this connection recently?

Mr. Brooke: I am always looking for further opportunities of securing employment for discharged prisoners, and if the

hon. and learned Gentleman has any specific suggestions or criticisms to make I very much hope that he will let me have them. It is absolutely true, as he says, that the essential part of the successful after-care of the discharged prisoner is to make sure that he has a job, somewhere to live, and a friend to whom he can turn.

Mr. Lubbock: Will the Home Secretary take an opportunity, at a comparatively near date, to tell us in detail which of the recommendations he accepts? While we are delighted to hear that he accepts them all in principle, we should like to go into the details to a greater extent than is possible at Question Time. In particular, has he accepted Recommendation No. 7, that there should be a single service for probation and after-care, and that its primary function should be reflected in its title?
Does the right hon. Gentleman accept the recommendation that encouragement— which, presumably, means financial encouragement— should be given to new after-care projects, such as the establishment of hostels for ex-offenders, which may be established by voluntary agencies?

Mr. Brooke: I am very anxious that we should go forward on both those fronts. I have accepted the recommendation that there should be a single probation and after-care service, but what will happen 50 years hence I cannot tell, because the Report itself visualises that a specialist service for aftercare alone might develop. But I am sure that the right thing is to go forward now with the single probation and after-care service. I used the words "in principle", because I think that I should give opportunities for various bodies and organisations which are closely concerned with, and are very knowledgeable about, the matter, to send me their observations, or to come to see me, if they so wish, about specific points in these recommendations.

Several Hon. Members: rose

Mr. Speaker: Order. We must get on.

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

3.37 p.m.

The Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development and President of the Board of Trade (Mr. Edward Heath): I beg to move,
That this House welcomes the emphasis placed by Her Majesty's Government on regional development as a means of promoting the growth and well-being of the country, and, in particular, approves the programmes outlined in the Command Papers on development and growth in North-East England and Central Scotland (Command Papers Nos. 2206 and 2188).
The Queen's Speech announced that
Plans for comprehensive regional development will be laid before you for central Scotland and North-East England. Plans appropriate to other regions will follow.
In my speech on the Loyal Address, I gave the background to the White Paper on the North-East of England and Central Scotland, and I should like now to say something more about that as well as on the present position of the location of industry generally. But, today, the House is discussing regional development as a whole. We are, therefore, examining the problems of other regions, and I have no doubt that many hon. Members will have particular points about their own constituencies that they will wish to raise.
I should like to say this by way of introduction on the question of regional development as a whole. We have three objectives in this policy. The first is to bring about a more even spread of economic activity throughout the country and thus to be able to make the fullest use of all our resources. It should enable us to avoid excessive pressures in areas where demand is already strong and, in particular, where it is strong for land and manpower. If we are able to achieve this, we can secure and maintain a faster rate of expansion.
The result of this would be to reduce the intense local pressures in the Midlands and in the South, which often, in the past, have endangered the price structure for the country as a whole and, as a result, the balance of payments. Moreover, if we are able to achieve this, then there is greater assurance of continued steady progress for the whole country in the economic sphere.
The second objective of the policy is to maintain the individual character of

the regions. This has been a source of great strength to us in the past, but it sometimes seems today that the regions and even the great cities of our country play a smaller part in our national life than they used to do and, in particular, in our national affairs. To me, this is a matter for regret. We do not want the diversity of regions to be weakened by an unchecked drift towards the South and an endless future of uniform asphalt conurbations. The diversity and versatility of our regions must be maintained.
Our third objective is to secure a more even improvement over the country as a whole of the general quality of life in all its aspects. If we are to have a more even/spread of employment as our first objective throughout the country the different regions must be able to offer a full life in all its aspects to the people who are to work in them. This applies to a large variety of activities—to theatres, housing, schools, research laboratories, universities, and, indeed, holiday camps. The plain fact is that the need for modernisation and, therefore, for the improvement of these amenities and the quality of life is greatest in the regions where industry developed first.
In pursuing these three objectives we are looking at things as part of the whole. Hitherto, in the House we have tended to debate regional problems mainly in terms of moving industry from one place to another. That is still of the greatest importance, but rising material standards are not our only objective in putting forward comprehensive policies for regional development. They are a means to an end, a means to the improvement of the conditions of life for our society widely spread over the country as a whole.
These, then, are the three objectives of regional policy which I submit to the House: a more even spread of economic activity; the preservation of the character of the individual regions; and a more even improvement in all the facilities to enable a better quality of life to be enjoyed throughout the country.
Turning to the White Papers before us, we are considering the programmes for the development of the North-East of England and Central Scotland. We began there because the needs of those areas are most urgent. I think that no


hon. Member and very few people in the country have quarrelled with that order. Certainly, in the visits which I have been paying to the other regions I have found no quarrel with it. Their problems stem from deep-rooted changes in the industrial structure which, to some extent, have been intensifying in recent years. These changes spring from the altered conditions of world demand in some cases and from the effect of technological advance on the demand for labour in others.
It is, therefore, right that we should give these two particular areas this degree of priority, and these policies which we have put forward have, I suggest, been warmly welcomed both in the North-East and in Central Scotland. However, when looking at regional development policy, it is not only a question of bringing into use unemployed resources in those two areas. In the South, and especially round London and Birmingham, there is a very different economic picture which creates problems of equal magnitude. It is here that we have the great concentrations of population and, together with it, a strong natural increase in that population. There is an employment growth sucking in more labour, not only from other part of the country, but from overseas.
Perhaps I may give the figures. There are 17¾ million people living in the South-East as a whole, taking the area from the Wash to Dorset. The population of this area grew by 1¼ million between 1951 and 1961. This was a growth of 7.7 per cent, compared with the national rate of 5.5 per cent. As I told the House last month, during the debate on the Address, the South-Eastern study covering this area, a study of land use and population, is well advanced. Perhaps the most daunting figure which has emerged from it is that over the next 20 years we expect an even more rapid rate of growth—a rate of 3½million people, or 20 per cent. The greater part of this increase will be not from migrants, but from people born in the South-East.
To sum up, looking at these regional problems, each region has different problems. Some are different in kind and others in degree. They arise from

the natural growth of population, sometimes from migration inwards, sometimes outwards. This has become particularly clear as a result of the revised figures which were provided only a short time ago. These have made an impact in revealing the scale of the problem in the South-East and the Midlands.
Secondly, the problems arise from the changing economic structure in the North—from the decline in activity in coal and, overall, in shipbuilding, especially in recent years, and from the heavy pressure on resources in the Midlands and the South.
The policies we are putting forward aim to bring together the different elements required for a comprehensive treatment for these different types of problem, and this is shown by the range of Departments involved in the creation of the policies. As I think the House will recognise, it is the first time that any Government has attempted to deal with comprehensive regional solutions of this kind. It is, I think, a concept which is widely approved. The arguments as I have read them in public and as, no doubt, we shall hear them in this debate are about the way in which it should be carried out.
Let us, therefore, look closely at how these policies should be implemented. When I spoke on the Address I referred to four main themes running through the White Papers. The first, which I emphasised and about which I should like today more today, is the theme of the growth areas. This was dealt with by the N.E.D.C. Report on Conditions Favourable to Faster Growth, earlier this year, which mentioned the previous background to it. There has, I think, been a general welcome for the Government's decision to adopt the concept of growth areas for Central Scotland and the North-East. These areas have been very carefully chosen. They are those which have the highest potential for rapid expansion. They are the ones placed to generate regional as well as local growth.
A large number of factors were taken into account before the choice was made, and perhaps I may mention some of them. There is the question of the availability of land for factories and houses; the presence of a plentiful water supply; the presence of ample labour resources; good


communications or the possibility of providing them; and an existing nucleus of industry which had proved to be successful.
In Scotland, this examination led to a series of growth points. In the North-East, it led to a single, larger growth zone, but the principles which determined the choice were the same in both cases. They were the considerations which I have mentioned to the House. In our view, the areas which we have chosen are those which can best help to create growth throughout these two regions. It is inherent in this approach that some places within a region will be specially favoured. Without this, the concept of growth places would have no meaning.
I hope that the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) will argue this, because one of the things on which we must make up our minds is whether we wish to have a concept of growth places. I know that there are hon. Members whose constituencies lie outside the growth zone in the North-East who are anxious about prospects for employment in them, and I ask them to recognise two things when we examine this concept. The first is that the extra effort which we are putting into the growth zone will be beneficial to the whole region. The prosperity which is created in it will undoubtedly spread outwards to the surrounding places in the same area and region. The second is that the White Paper takes nothing away from places outside the growth zones which they have already.

Mr. William Ross: And that is not much.

Mr. Heath: The hon. Member knows full well that they have all the inducements which are available to development districts. The development districts will continue to enjoy the benefits of free depreciation and assistance under the Local Employment Acts.
The other thing which I should like to emphasise is that there is no question of bringing to a halt public investment in places outside the growth zone. I am sure that many of these places will be able to attract new industry as a result of the inducements which are available under the Acts. Some of them will become points for local expansion.

but it would not be realistic to regard them as having a potential for generating regional growth on anything like the same scale as the places which have been named as the growth zone. Where the development programme, the public investment in the growth zone, looks likely to alter the travel-to-work pattern from the areas immediately outside it, which concerns both the North-East and Central Scotland, then we shall pay particular attention to the whole question of the local communications between the growth points and places from which they are nicely to draw their labour.
The first question which I should like to put to the right hon. Member for Battersea, North, so that we may know the basis for this debate, is whether he and his party accept the concept of the growth zone as I have explained it to the House. In other words, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we should concentrate our resources on these places?

Mr. Archie Manuel: That is a Government job. It is not the Opposition's job.

Mr. Heath: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that we should concentrate our resources on those places, or is it the suggestion that we should spread our resources over a much wider area? This is fundamental to the concept of regional development as it has been put forward in the White Papers. If the resources are spread over a much wider area— this is the decision which the Government had to make and which they have made—that is less effective than concentrating on growth where we believe success to be possible.
Alternatively, if the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends want us to put an equal amount of resources over the whole of the zone, then we would make greater demands on our resources, and he and his hon. Friends are already saying that we are exceeding the possible supply of those resources. The right hon. Gentleman must face this dilemma.
The second feature of the policies is the build-up of capital investment in these growth zones. Perhaps I should remind the House of the scale of this investment. Public investment in the North-East will be about £80 million


this year, compared with £55 million in 1962–63. That is the scale of the increase in this region. Next year it is planned to rise to £90 million and then the percentage of the gross national product deployed in the region will remain the same. In Central Scotland public investment is expected to rise from £100 million last year to about £130 million this year and to more than £140 million next year, and then in the same way to retain that proportion of the gross national product.
I give these figures in answer to those who question whether enough is being done under the two White Papers in investment in the two zones. I think that I have demonstrated to the House that there is a considerable increase in scale in both cases. Of course, it means proportionately rather less for the other regions, but in making regional visits both to the Midlands and the North-West, I have found no envy of the fact that these two regions are to receive proportionately a higher amount of the public investment. In talking to employers and trade unions as well as local authorities and the development councils in these other areas, I have found absolutely no jealousy, but full recognition that this is the right policy.

Mr. E. Shinwell: And Merseyside?

Mr. Heath: If the right hon. Gentleman thinks about Merseyside, he will realise that there are considerable problems there; but I found no envy on Merseyside of the action being taken for the North-East. I was pleased to find that. Merseyside is concentrating on how it can develop its own policies with the Government's into a comprehensive plan.
The third feature to which I drew attention in my speech on the Address was that of continuity of policy in the two White Papers. I should like to stress this again today and to add something to it. I do not want there to be any misunderstanding about the nature of the Government's financial commitment to Central Scotland and the North-East. First, there is the undertaking that the special inducements to industry available under the Local Employment Acts will continue to be available in the growth areas so long as the need for them lasts. Both White Papers are quite

categorical about this and paragraph 7(ii) of that on the North-East says that no part of it will be removed from the lists until there is strong evidence of a general and sustained improvement in employment in the region as a whole. The growth areas can be fully assured of a stable policy and continued benefits under these Acts.
Secondly, let me state the Government's intention about public investment in the growth areas. The proportion of the total public investment which is going to the North-East and Central Scotland up to the end of the next financial year is, as I have already said, a significantly higher proportion than the proportion of the general population living there. We have already said that we envisage that for some years after 1965 the growth areas will receive the same generous proportion of a steadily expanding level of total public service investment.
What I wish to add is that even if it were necessary to moderate the growth of public service investment in the country as a whole, exceptions would be made for these growth areas where the programme will be maintained so long as the necessary resources are available. Local authorities, the construction industries and those who live in the regions can look forward with confidence to continued backing from the Government for the development and modernisation of the basic public services for which the investment is being used. This, I suggest to those who are asking whether enough is being done, is a commitment of no mean order. It is a unique commitment of a Government to the regions. Those are some of the characteristics of the programmes for Central Scotland and the North-East of England.

Dr. J. Dickson Mabon: If it is true that this is to represent a static proportion of what we hope will be a rising national income, then the figures themselves are very important. In the Press notice which accompanied the White Paper on Central Scotland, the figure mentioned for the two years 1964–65 and 1965–66 was £400 million, which is far short of what the right hon. Gentleman has said. Will he look again at these figures, in view of their obvious importance?

Mr. Heath: I will certainly do that. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland will be winding up the debate tonight, and will be able to deal with that in detail. The undertaking in the White Papers is quite clear—this proportion of the gross national product having been reached, it will be maintained in the successive periods after that. That applies both to Scotland and the North-East of England.
Perhaps I may now say something in more detail about the other areas, which have their problems although often very different. I have said something of the problems of the South-East. As I said in my speech on the Address, we are working on plans for other regions whose problems are also pressing. A study is in hand for Wales. Its general objective is to carry out a survey of the population and economic prospects over the next 20 years. On this we shall be able to base our plans for the use of land and investment. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland has similar studies in hand for parts of Scotland outside the central zone.
In conjunction with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government, I am setting up an interdepartmental group under Board of Trade chairmanship to carry out a survey of economic and planning problems in the North-West. I visited the North-West 10 days ago and discussed with the authorities there and with many individual bodies the particular problems of that area, which has both areas of congestion and areas of lack of employment. The group will take as its starting point the land use studies undertaken by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government on Merseyside, the Manchester conurbations and certain other parts of the region. These studies are now well advanced.

Mr. Percy Collick: Has the right hon. Gentleman no more than that to say about Merseyside? What he has said will be most disappointing if that is all he has to say.

Mr. Heath: What I have said about Merseyside is that many of the land studies are well advanced and that we

will now have a group, as we had for the North-East, which will be able to bring together those studies and the economic problems of Merseyside and then lead to a comprehensive policy for the area as a whole. When I was in Merseyside I found that this proposal was welcomed as a policy in the interests of the whole of the North-West.
A delegation from the South-West has already been to see me to discuss that area's problems and I have undertaken to visit the area early in the new year. My task will be to see that regional plans are related to the needs of the country as a whole.

Mr. Charles Loughlin: Can the right hon. Gentleman say how long it is to be before we can expect some action to meet the situation in the South-West?

Mr. Heath: I have dealt with the South-West in the general context of the economic action now being taken, but I can give no specific date for the publication of a White Paper on the long-term policy. This is to be discussed in the new year.

Mr. Loughlin: After the election or before?

Mr. Heath: If necessary, we can continue after the election.

Mr. Stanley R. McMaster: I hope that my right hon. Friend will have something to say about Northern Ireland.

Mr. Heath: I shall, but my hon. Friend knows that responsibility for these matters in Northern Ireland rests with the Government of Northern Ireland, with whom we are in communication about them.
The regional studies will be built up together in the light of the approach which I have mentioned. This is important from the point of view of some of the proposals which have been put forward by right hon. Gentlemen opposite as to the way in which this is to be handled. This is a combination, as the hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) once said, of the intertwining of national and regional policies. Many policies have to be laid down on a national, but implemented on a regional, basis.
With this we are now creating the machinery. As I told the House, I have established an interdepartmental steering group under the Board of Trade's chairmanship, composed of senior officials from other Departments concerned, including the Scottish Development Department. This group is already at work. It has three main tasks. They are, first, to consider the line on which future regional plans should be prepared and to maintain contact with the progress of the work on them; secondly, to maintain oversight of the implementation of the regional plans; and, thirdly, to advise on the general policy which bears on regional development. It will draw on the advice of other Departments and also be the channel for communication with the Government of Northern Ireland so that a full exchange of information of these matters can take place with that Government.
I have also asked the group to pay particular attention to the question of research, statistics and economic advice on regional matters, because there is still much more work to be done in this respect. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland is responsible for implementing the plan for Central Scotland and the main instrument for implementing the plan in the North-East will be the Regional Development Group. This consists of senior officials, both administrative and technical, in the region of the Department concerned.
I think that this is important in connection with the discussion which is also taking place on whether it is right to try to carry through plans of this kind by an organisation of the representatives of the Departments in the region, or whether some fresh machinery, elected or unelected, should be created for this purpose. We considered that the means of implementing it should be through the regional representatives of the Whitehall Department. This group will meet as frequently as is necessary and not less than once a month. It held its first meeting six days after the White Paper was published and it will hold a second meeting on Thursday of this week. The regional officials of the Department are all senior men in close contact with the local authorities. They do not need day-to-day supervision, but

they do need a direct link with the Departments in Whitehall and with the inter-departmental steering group so that their views and experience may be used in the formulation of a policy as well as in its implementation.
This link will be provided by the Chairman, who is the Under-Secretary in charge of the Regional Development Division which has been created at the Board of Trade. He was involved in preparing the North-East proposals and thus will be in close touch with the progress in the region.

Mr. Shinwell: May I ask whether this task is of a practical character on the general line of policy formulated by the Government for a particular region? Will their task be to expedite the implementation of the plan, and, for example, make decisions about road construction, or housing, or the like?

Mr. Heath: Yes, Sir. The task is entirely of a practical nature, to carry out exactly what the right hon. Gentleman has described. They will be meeting frequently. There will be a firm link between my own and other Departments in Whitehall, and with myself, through the Chairman, the head of the Regional Development Group, who will be chairing their meetings. We believe that this is a simple, practical and effective means of implementing the proposals without the creation of some other all-regional structure of a new kind.

Mr. Ernest Popplewell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, West): Would not it also be possible for the group to recommend a crash programme which might deal with the unemployment in the area until the long-term schemes become operative and stop the drift away from the area?

Mr. Heath: As I said, one of its tasks is to keep us informed of any proposals which it is thought need to be undertaken and either implement or expedite whatever proposals it likes to put forward. Regional officers are, of course, entitled to do so; indeed it is their duty to do so. They can do so after effective discussion under this arrangement.

Sir Robert Cary: Are these individuals to be independent commanders in their own


regions, capable of taking independent action? Or are they entirely responsible to the Board of Trade?

Mr. Heath: They are senior officials. In some cases they have delegated powers, Many senior officials do have delegated powers in the regions, under which they can act. They are implementing policy laid down by the Government in the White Papers and, therefore, their task is of a practical kind. At the same time, they can put forward proposals to their own chairman or directly to the central Department in Whitehall.

Mr. Edwin Wainwright: There has, as yet, been no mention of Yorkshire. At present, South Yorkshire has not a heavy rate of unemployment. But the right hon. Gentleman must be aware that the Iron and Steel Board, with the large efficient plant that it has, will make certain that it will close down the small steelworks throughout the whole of South Yorkshire. Will the right hon. Gentleman take note of this issue, because it could affect South Yorkshire seriously in the near future?

Mr. Heath: I will take full note of that, and I am sure that when I am in Yorkshire, at the end of next week, all these problems will be laid before me.
This is the machinery we have created to implement our policy and we shall see what developments are necessary. We are not being rigid and dogmatic. But I think that the structure for implementing this is one of the most important aspects. Some hon. Members have suggested, and there has been discussion in the Press, that there should be full regional autonomy. It has been suggested that the arrangement should be subject to the planning authorities in land usage rather than industry. But I think that this is a matter for policy decisions at the national level and implementation at the local level which combines control and flexibility through the existing machinery.
These are long-term plans, and, as I said in the speech on the Address, the complete programme will take a considerable time. But promises of continuity for Government policy support that fact. Many other questions con-

cern the immediate future and action is being taken to deal with this. As many points of this kind will be raised in the debate, I should like to say something about it now.
The immediate action affecting the regions under discussion in the White Paper, or which could well affect them in the next few months, is, first, the general expansion of the economy which is making itself felt in the regions more remote from the South. Secondly, the shipbuilding credit scheme, of which £75 million has meant orders for all the major yards in the country. Thirdly, the action of the Local Employment Acts of 1960 and 1963 which affect all the development districts. Fourthly, the extra investment already made in the North-East during this year while the proposals were being formulated.All these will contribute to further employment and to the benefit of the people in the North-East and Central Scotland.
Let me say a word about the Local Employment Acts. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) has constantly been critical of what has been achieved by them. I suggest to the House that a considerable success has been achieved. Under these Acts, £93 million has gone to nearly 500 projects estimated to provide nearly 100,000 jobs. Of these, Scotland has had £47 million for 242 projects and 38,000 jobs. The North-East has had £15 million for 111 projects and 17,000 jobs.
When the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members point to the unemployment figures, and say that this scheme has been a complete failure, the position is that because of the decline in the structural industries in these regions there has been an increasing amount of unemployment which this has been used to counteract, and has counteracted to a considerable extent.
The provision of 38,000 jobs in Scotland and the £47 million expenditure of inducing industry to go there is a considerable achievement, even if it has not been able entirely to replace the unemployment caused by the structural change.

Mr. Ross: We have never said that nothing was done. We have said that the Act has not succeeded. The basis of the Bill was its ability to anticipate


unemployment. We knew, because we had statements in the House, of the number of coal pits which would be closed. We knew about the unemployment which was coming. The fact is that we have a higher figure of unemployment now than before, and this shows that the Act has not succeeded.

Mr. Heath: I cannot accept that analysis. These facts were well known to the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he was the Board of Trade and I was at the Ministry of Labour and the measure was passed. It was to anticipate that that the Act was passed. In so far as it has been possible to induce industry to provide 38,000 jobs in Scotland, the Measure has been successful. That ought to be acknowledged.
These jobs are either in new industries diversifying the structure, or in established industries which are expanding there. One of the best yardsticks by which we can judge the prospects of an area is the extent to which its own industry is expanding. In this respect, the number of firms expanding in development districts is encouraging. This is borne out in the applications we have so far received under the 1963 Act because it shows that a very large number of firms already in this district are using the facilities to expand. This is an encouraging feature.
In the North-East I can tell the House that the Cummins Engine Company is this afternoon announcing a large new project in Darlington to go up alongside the Chrysler-Cummins factory already announced. This factory is for the manufacture of diesel fuel systems and other engine components and will provide jobs for over 700 people. It should be completed at the beginning of 1965. Construction is beginning immediately. This, again, is an example of anticipation of industry going to an area in which it is known that because of structural changes there will be redundancy. This is an excellent example of a firm accepting this inducement to provide considerable employment.

Mr. Jeremy Thorpe: Is not it a fact that over 50 per cent., of the applications received are turned down? Can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what the number of refusals?

Mr. Heath: Yes, the figure is nothing like that. I do not think that I have the figures here now, but I will try to give the hon. Gentleman a breakdown a little later.
The introduction of the standard grants has completed the pattern of inducements available to industry. Combined with the free depreciation in the Finance Act, this now provides a package which meets every kind of demand. So far as the 1963 Act is concerned, we have received1,150 applications for standard grants; that was up to last Friday. Of these, 352 have been for projects in Central Scotland;341 for projects in the North-East. For a time this was an overwhelming response and I acknowledge that this was so. But we have now approved, or otherwise dealt with, over two-thirds of the applications, and the time cannot be far off when we shall be getting claims for buildings and meeting them.

Mr. Ross: How many have been approved?

Mr. Heath: We have approved that number, over two-thirds of 1,150.

Dr. Dickson Mabon: The right hon. Gentleman said "otherwise dealt with".

Mr. Heath: I say that we have dealt with over two-thirds, which is about 750. Some have been withdrawn. The number of those withdrawn is 100, and that includes those withdrawn as well as those rejected.

Mr. Collick: How many for Merseyside?

Mr. Heath: I cannot give a detailed breakdown of each region in the area. I have given the broad details in respect of the White Papers with which we are concerned.

Mr. Wainwright: Will the right hon. Gentleman—

Mr. Heath: No, I cannot give way again.
I wish to say a word about the advance factories, because those who ask what is being done at the moment must acknowledge that there is a considerable programme of advance factory building. Fifteen will be completed by the end of this year. Of the 15, five have been let, and another17 will be completed


next year. I am now considering a further programme of advance factory building, and I hope to make an announcement about this soon.
There is sometimes criticism about the operation of the policy of industrial development certificates. We are criticised from both sides—by those who say that the policy is too severe, and by those who say it is not tough enough. But there is no doubt that the policy has been effective in bringing a much greater share of new jobs in proportion to the existing employment to the areas which have problems.
I should like to give the figures to the House. The estimated additional employment arising from the industrial development certificates granted in the North-East since the 1960 Act amounts to 7.6 per cent, of the number employed in manufacturing industries in the region, and in Scotland it is 5.4 per cent. These figures compare with the national average of 3.6 per cent, and the Midland region average of only 1.5 per cent. This shows that the development districts in the North-East and Scotland are getting a much greater proportion of space under the I.D.C.s than the congested areas of the Midlands or the South.

Mr. George Lawson: I apologise for interrupting the right hon. Gentleman, but this is a very important statement and I should like him to comment on the fact that over the last few years—and the situation is still continuing—Scotland has had substantially less than her share of industrial building. It runs at about 8 per cent., and sometimes at 1½ per cent. of the industrial building going on in the country. Does not this mean that the relative position of Scotland continues to worsen all the time, and, if so, does not it make nonsense of what the right hon. Gentleman said?

Mr. Heath: I think not. My figures show that under the I.D.C. policy, and its implementation, relatively, Scotland is getting a much larger share than either the Midlands or the South-East—

Mr. Lawson: Nonsense.

Mr. Heath: —and that this is the justification for a severe policy for those who are employed, and are industrialists, in the Midlands and the South-East.
Lastly, may I say a word about the shipbuilding credit scheme. This scheme will allow for about 800,000 gross tons to be built, and all the major shipbuilding areas have obtained a reasonable share.
Those, then, are the factors which are bearing on the immediate situation in these areas and show what the Government have done to increase employment opportunities in the areas of the development districts in particular. To those who are critical of this position, I ask what more do they suggest should be done by way of inducements? Employers feel that the inducements are now satisfactory and well worth while, and they have not put forward any alternative suggestions as to the inducements they would require to go to these areas. Or are we now to move into a policy of the direction of industry? I hope that the right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends will not suggest that, and that we shall continue to rely on a policy of inducing industry to go to these areas.
The right hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends have not always been clear whether they are prepared to agree to the direction of industry. Let us be quite clear that we are not going to do so. The right hon. Gentleman says, in the Opposition's Amendment that this requires a national plan. I suggest that this is not a situation which calls for a cut and dried national plan of the kind they suggest, imposing a rigid theoretical framework on the different regions whether they fit into it or not.
Hon. Gentlemen opposite have said in their publication, Signposts for the Sixties, that they have no desire to see that. They say that a rigid national plan is neither desirable nor necessary since so many decisions must be taken locally. What is needed is a small central planning staff with the powers necessary to ensure that the plans of the local authorities, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, and those of the Board of Trade all fit together. This is exactly the form of co-ordination of the Departments which has been adopted under the machinery which I have explained to the House. The right hon. Gentleman will have to explain how he wants to


have a national plan into which everything else is to be fitted, whereas his party's policy document calls for exactly the reverse.

Mr. Edward Short: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. The right hon. Gentleman has quoted from a document. Is it not the rule that the document in question has to be placed on the Table?

Mr. Speaker: I have yet to learn that that party propaganda comes within the rule. Might I remind the House that the more noise and interruptions there are, the fewer hon. Members will get into the debate.

Mr. Heath: Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman would like to read the document for himself to refresh his memory on what he has been asking for in the past.

Mr. W. A. Wilkins: I saw the Minister reading the document to which my hon. Friend referred. In these circumstances ought not he to lay it on the Table?

Mr. Speaker: It is not a document of a character that comes within the rule.

Mr. Heath: In fact, the document is lying on the Table, though it is well covered at the moment.
The procedure we are following here is a practical one. We are surveying the regions as individual areas, and we are dealing with them in the order of the most urgent problems. We are now identifying the nature and scope of the rest of them, and on this basis we shall decide in each case on the action which is required. I believe, therefore, that we are meeting the needs of the House in providing a long-term policy to deal with the structural basis of each of the regions. We have taken immediate steps to deal with the pressing problems in the months ahead while these proposals are being implemented and coming to fruition. We believe that we are meeting both the short-term and the long-term requirements of regional development, and we believe that it deserves the support of the House.

4.27 p.m.

Mr. Douglas Jay: I beg to move, to leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
regrets that Her Majesty's Government's belated proposals for regional development while omitting many important areas, offer neither any immediate effective help nor a long-term remedy for unemployment and depopulation, declares its determination to ensure healthy and balanced development of all parts of the United Kingdom, and asserts that this will be achieved only through regional planning within the framework of a national plan".
I welcome most warmly the conversion of the Minister to so many truths which we have been preaching for the last 10 years. I welcome particularly his conversion, or professed conversion, to the policies of expansion and regional planning which we have been preaching and which the Government have been declaring to be impracticable for the last 12 years.
The right hon. Gentleman ended his speech with some fine words about all the things he hopes to do, but I cannot help recalling that when the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is here today, moved the Second Reading of the Local Employment Bill, on 9th November, 1959, he ended his speech with these words:
The Bill provides a new framework for dealing with the problem of local unemployment and will add success in this field to the many that the Government have had in other fields."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 9th November. 1959; Vol. 613, c. 47–8.]
Three years after that Bill became law unemployment had risen to 6 per cent, in Wales, to 6.2 per cent, in Scotland, and to 7 per cent, on the North-East Coast. Evidently, therefore, one ounce of hard experience in this matter is worth tons of Ministerial verbiage, and for this reason I approach the Government's new White Papers and the right hon. Gentleman's speeches with a somewhat sceptical eye.
The more carefully one examines these White Papers, the more insubstantial and unbalanced they appear to be. The first thing that emerges is that the Government are now almost totally reversing the main idea of the Local Employment Act, 1960. In 1960, the Chancellor's wonderful new concept was to abandon the comprehensive development areas of 1945


and substitute small separate development districts. Now, four years later, the Government are abandoning the separate development districts and returning to the general concept of broad industrial areas. But, of course, they do it in a hopelessly arbitrary, unbalanced, and indefensible way. The list of growth areas contained in these White Papers is extraordinary. It is not only far less rational than the list of development areas of 1945. It is the least defensible of any list of these areas published or compiled since the Special Areas Act, 1934.
First, it leaves out of the new growth areas half the areas in Great Britain threatened by unemployment and needing development. It leaves out, incidentally, the whole of Wales, although unemployment in that region reached 6 per cent, in February, this year. It leaves out Cornwall, the whole of Merseyside—Merseyside itself, this October, had an unemployment figure of 5·1 per cent.—the Burnley area with unemployment at 5·7 per cent., Barrow, 5·2 per cent, and the whole of West Cumberland, where it was 5 per cent. All these areas have been included in almost all previous lists of development areas.
But even more extraordinary is the Minister's decision to exclude, completely arbitrarily, large under-employed areas within Scotland and the North-East Coast. On the North-East Coast, he excludes almost all North-West and South-West Durham, declining coalfields with heavy unemployment, which have been always included in all previous lists of development areas up till now.

Mr. Heath: From what are they being excluded?

Mr. Jay: The right hon. Gentleman should know that they are being excluded from the growth areas, which, presumably, mean something. I am coming in a minute to discuss what they mean. Presumably, the right hon. Gentleman is not telling us that his growth areas are meaningless, and presumably he has looked at his own map.
The growth areas on the right hon. Gentleman's map exclude Bishop Auckland, Crook, Willington, Stanley, Consett, and Prudhoe, in Durham. They exclude the Blyth coalfield area in Northumberland and the declining Orfield, in North Yorkshire, including

Saltburn, which now has unemployment of 10·9 per cent.
The treatment of the North-East Coast is even more peculiar than this. I am not sure that the right hon. Gentleman quite realises what he is doing. Let us take Sunderland, The Hartlepools and Easington. Although those three areas appear on the map to be included in the growth areas, the text of the White Paper rather shamefacedly admitted that they will be excluded.

Mr. Rupert Speir: The right hon. Gentleman is quite wrong in his information. Prudhoe is not in Durham, but in Northumberland. It also remains a designated district under the Local Employment Act, and gets all the benefits of that Act and of free depreciation.

Mr. Jay: I said that Prudhoe was in the North-East, which it is, and I said that it was excluded from the growth area, which it also is.
I am making the point that the White Paper abort the North-East growth areas says that priority will be given to the conurbations of Tyne-side and Tees-side, and to the Darlington-Aycliffe area in the public investment programme. I think that the Minister should tell us—the hon. Member will be interested in this with his knowledge of geography—that is he including The Hartlepools or Sunderland in the "conurbation of Tyne-side and Tees-side"? Of course, he cannot. What, in fact, emerges is that not merely these other areas, but Sunderland and The Hartlepools, two of the largest cities of really heavy unemployment anywhere in the United Kingdom, are being excluded also from the growth areas.
The exclusions in Scotland seem to me no less extraordinary. Not only are the Highlands and Islands, Peterhead and Aberdeen completely excluded, but also the industrial areas of Dundee, Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Ayr, Greenock, Gourock and Port Glasgow, where unemployment in October was 8 per cent., Glasgow itself, Paisley and almost the whole of Clydeside are all left out. How can the Minister justify omitting all these vital industrial areas, even in Scotland and the North-East Coast, from his list? Does the Minister think that West Durham, or Dundee, or the


Greenock area are just not worth developing, or has he written them off as derelict areas past hope?
Will he also tell us, because he did not make it clear today although he touched on the point, what is the criterion for the selection of the growth areas? It seems to me that we could have one of two rational criteria if we are to have these growth areas at all. Either we could choose the areas most in need, or those most promising for development. I ask the right hon. Gentleman, if the criterion is need, why does he leave out Greenock, Gourock and Port Glasgow? If it is suitability for development, why does he leave out Paisley and Linwood, where very promising developments by Rootes and Pressed Steel are going forward?
Even more extraordinary, why include Newcastle and leave out Glasgow? Is that because the Secretary of State for Scotland is in the Cabinet, or why is it? Perhaps the Minister would at least answer this: why include Team Valley and leave out Hillington? We get no answer. The real reason is that no rational answer can be given to those questions, because there is no rhyme or reason in this selection at all. It is not a coherent plan, or even a coherent policy. It is just the amalgamation, in a rather clumsy fashion, of two quite separately prepared projects, which do not add up even to a regional plan, let alone a national plan.
The Minister may say—I think that this is what he had in mind a few minutes ago—that it does not really matter what is in the growth areas and what is not, because the other areas are still development districts. That, I think, is a muddle anyway. But, presumably, the Minister believes that his growth areas mean something, and that some substantial benefits accrue to them. If that is not so, then this new policy is almost wholly a sham. But if the growth areas do enjoy some benefits—and I suppose that that is his case—then it is obvious that the excluded areas are deprived of them.
Next, I warn the House, however, against supposing that the new benefits going to the growth areas are very substantial. What are they in fact? According to the White Papers they are priority for investment in public ser-

vice. That is what is going to the growth areas. The first question which I would ask the Minister is whether the building of Government-financed factories in these areas—and this is the biggest single weapon in development area policy—is included for this purpose in public investment. I would be glad if the Minister would tell me right away; but I do not think that he knows. If it does include Government-financed factories in public investment, then all the excluded areas are being deprived of some important benefits which they are getting now.
That must be so, and I hope that we shall know before the end of the debate whether this item is included or not. It is the most crucial weapon in development area policy, and I do not think that Ministers, know what they are doing about it, judging from the right hon. Gentleman's demeanour.

Mr. Heath: What would be important would be if we were saying that no advance factories will ever be built anywhere except in the growth zones. That is not our policy.

Mr. Jay: I am not talking only about advance factories. The right hon. Gentleman should know that advance factories are not the only Government financed factories by a long way.
Let us see how great this new public investment effort will be, even within the arbitrary selected growth areas. We are told that total public service investment in Central Scotland will increase from the already announced programme for this year of £130 million to £140 million in 1964–65, and then will grow at the same rate as elsewhere. That is the sum total of the change announced in this White Paper over and above the policies that we have heard before. Everything else is a gathering together of already known schemes, announced last winter or on previous dates. Let us, therefore, look at this figure carefully.
Since everything is supposed to grow at 4 per cent, a year nowadays—apart from M.P.s'salaries—the present year's £130 million programme ought to rise anyway to over £135 million, without any change in policy; so the real change announced in all this is a rise from about £135 million to £140 million. But that is within the margin of error of


the figures. According to the Government's latest White Paper on Public Investment the turn-out last year was 3 per cent, less than the forecast previously published.
Even so, I hope that Scotland will particularly note that the minor increase which is promised is not for the whole of Scotland, but merely for Central Scotland. The White Paper contains no guarantee—and perhaps the Secretary of State will say something about this tonight—that there will be any increase in Scotland as a whole, or that the increase in Central Scotland will not be financed or balanced by decreases in Dundee, Aberdeen, Dumfries, Kilmarnock and, indeed, the Greenock area—unless that is included in Central Scotland. We should be given an assurance tonight that this increase is for Scotland as a whole and is not just a shift from one part to another.
In the North-East the change is equally negligible. Here the White Paper tells us that the total public investment is to rise from £80 million this year, as a result of the decisions already taken, to nearly £90 million, and thereafter simply to grow with the national income. As 4 per cent, would carry £80 million to over £83 million anyway, the increase, if it comes off, will be from rather over £83 million to rather under £90 million. That is the whole measure of what is promised for these areas in the two White Papers, when we look at the hard kernel of facts under all the verbiage about infrastructure, modernisation and the rest.
I grant to the Secretary of State that, although he is an ex-Chief Whip, he is never at a loss for words. Another sphere in which there is a truly astonishing contrast between Ministerial words and the actual proposals contained in the White Paper is the regional organisation which we are now getting. We were constantly told—not merely by the sycophantic Press, but by the previous Prime Minister, in this House, on 1st August—that a great new and revolutionary experiment in regional government was to be unfolded, and that it had taken Lord Hailsham—as he then was—12 months of profound cogitation to work it all out. What is the result, in hard facts? In Scotland nothing—absolutely nothing. In Scotland, a development group of officials—as it is

called—which is already in being, will—and I use the exact words of the White Paper—"continue in being". That is a revolution! Modernisation in this case means simply "as you were".
To be fair to the right hon. Gentleman—as I always am—in the North-East there is a change. Some officials are to be moved from one building in Newcastle to another building in Newcastle. That is the extent of the revolution on Tyneside. The Minister described this organisation today; but he did not seem to realise that from 1944 to 1951 regional controllers in all the economic Departments, including a Ministry of Town and Country Planning Controller, who linked up with the town planning machinery, met every week, in regional distribution of industry committees, in every regional capital and not just in Newcastle and Scotland. At headquarters, there was substantially similar machinery to that which the right hon. Gentleman announced today. The only difference is that in those days we did not announce it in public.
But after 1951 the party opposite discontinued all this. It abolished the regional controller of town planning, and closed down the Board of Trade offices in Dundee and Swansea. All this was done as; a financial economy. Now the Government audaciously appoint a Ministry of Housing controller and two other departmental controllers in one regional capital only, namely, Newcastle. Modernisation here means that the Government are moving about one-tenth of the way back to 1944.
Some optimists have already supposed that under this exciting new policy rail communications will be improved, or at least preserved, as part of the development in the growth areas. For instance, they have supposed that there would be electrification of the line from Glasgow to Gourock—something that has been proposed for about 25 years—or at least a promise not to accept Dr. Beeching'S proposal to close the railway line from Carlisle to Stranraer, the chief link with Northern Ireland, which has a higher unemployment percentage even than Scotland or the North-East Coast. But no such assurance on these points is to be found anywhere in the White Paper. I wonder whether the Secretary of State cart give us any assurances on these matters this evening.
We were delighted when the Prime Minister, at Question Time last week, summarily threw over the whole policy of Dr. Beeching and the Minister of Transport. Apparently nothing is to be closed, anywhere, until there is some alternative means of getting through. What a pity the Prime Minister never told the authors of these two White Papers about this important decision—because the author of the Scottish White Paper, in describing the great new future envisaged for die railways in this modern age, uttered this rousing piece of prose—which, to be fair, I shall also quote exactly—about the favoured growth area in central Scotland:
The closures of passenger lines suggested in this area are unlikely to have any widespread serious impact. But arrangements have been made to ensure that, when any closure proposal comes before the Minister of Transport, he will, in consultation with the Secretary of State for Scotland, take account of its consequences in terms of the planned economic development of the area concerned.
I am sure that these ringing words will warm the heart of every patriotic Scotsman.
Nor is there any change recorded in the White Papers concerning the Government's policy for derelict sites. The Distribution of Industry Act, 1945, included not merely a Section empowering the Government to give grants for basic public services in these areas—which the Government have failed to use for most of the last 12 years—but a separate Section giving power to the Board of Trade to clear derelict areas and charge 100 per cent, of the cost to the central Government account. The Governments that we have had since 1951 have never used that power, and even now they are offering, as a great advance, only 85 per cent, of the cost to local authorities, instead of providing 100 per cent, themselves.
All that we really have in these White Papers, therefore, is a rather modest programme, applied in only a few areas, without any real assurance that even this will be carried out. One very strong piece of evidence which leads me to doubt whether it will be carried out is the complete absence in the White Papers, or in Ministers' speeches, of any convincing declaration that the Government, this time, will resolutely restrain over-expansion in the congested South-

East. Without that we shall not cure depopulation or unemployment in the North and West, or the appalling housing shortage, traffic chaos and infringement of the green belt in the South. For these are different aspects of one and the same phenomenon. The dereliction in the North and West is caused simply by the drift to the South-East.
I have given figures to show this on previous occasions, and I shall not give them again. At any rate, I gather that we have at least converted the right hon. Gentleman to an understanding of this truth. The Buchanan Report has made painfully clear the appalling economic cost—quite apart from the human and social cost—of this Gadarene process. The worse we allow congestion to become, the greater will be the economic cost of decongestion.
There is no mystery about what is happening. The tens of thousands who are coming and have been coming from the North to the South-East and the Midlands in search of jobs and houses do not come because they want to. They come because employment is expanding in the South-East, but not in the North. That, in turn, is happening because those who build new factories and new offices find it more convenient, profitable and pleasant to do it in the South-East of England.
The right hon. Gentleman asked us about our policy. I will, therefore, tell him that it is a most dangerous fallacy to believe that individual firms or property developers can be induced by incentives, bribes, or whatever one calls them, alone to prefer the North of England. I assure the Minister emphatically, speaking as one who has had the job of discussing this point with numbers of firms, that in the great majority of cases the determining factor is not any careful calculation of economic gain.
It is what the people concerned call the "convenience" of the management. That usually means the wish of two or three top people to live not too far away from London. Let us face this quite frankly. We should, if we mean this seriously. However much money is spent—I am all in favour of doing it—on beautifying Gateshead, it will not be made more attractive to the average managing director than Mayfair. Even


Lord Hailsham prefers Marylebone, apparently.
Let us have all these incentives and embellishments as a supplement to restraint. But if the Government try to make incentives a substitute for restraint in the congested areas, they will fail. Incidentally, they will fail at a very great cost in public money. That is the real reason why the Government have spent all the money which the right hon. Gentleman quoted earlier under the Local Employment Act and why, at the end of the day, unemployment is higher than it was at the beginning.
The Labour Government, during the first six years after the war, spent almost no money, but invested a great deal in factory building and the purchase of trading estates. And unemployment fell to 1.8 per cent, on the North-East Coast and to 2 per cent, in Scotland. During the past four years a great deal of money has been spent, and unemployment has risen and not gone down. It is no good the Minister pretending that the Government are exerting effective restraint yet either on factory building or on office building in the South. I ask him to examine the figures carefully.
I will give the Minister the figures that matter. In the whole six years from 1945 to 1951 about 30 per cent, of all new factory building in Great Britain in terms of square feet went to the development areas. Throughout 1960, 1961 and 1962 the share going to the development areas was under 20 per cent. It was actually less in those three years than the share going to the London and south-eastern region alone, excluding the eastern region and the southern region, and excluding all office building. Those are the significant figures. If Ministers in this debate pretend that they are really using the I.D.C.s resolutely, let them give us the corresponding figures for 1963 before the end of the debate. Then we shall know where we are on factory building.
Nor has anything effective been done even now to check the London office boom, which is the real source of the trouble. I know that the Minister of Housing and Local Government has given slightly greater powers of control to local authorities, thus half closing the stable door after the house has dis-

appeared over the horizon. He has started a Location of Offices Bureau, which no doubt with the very best of intentions is doing its best to restrain office developers from building in Central London and inducing them instead to go to Croydon, Watford, Ealing and certain places of that nature. I hope that they will; but this will make no difference to the main issue.
Instead of discussing this in generalities, let me quote four instances where, in my view, the Government have lost a chance to check this over-congestion in the South-East. First, the Ford Motor Company has been allowed to build a major new research and development unit at Basildon. It could perfectly well have gone to Merseyside, where Fords already have a major factory at Hales-wood. In each one of these cases an argument can be advanced for letting such a unit be built in the South. But if each one of these arguments is accepted, we are bound to lose the main battle. That is what has been happening.
Secondly—I know that the Minister of Housing and Local Government is interested in this—the present release of sites in London by the railways has offered the greatest chance since the war to find land for new council house-building in London. The Government should have laid it down that all railway sites suitable should be used for housing without exception, and the Government themselves if necessary should compensate the railways. Instead of that, Ministers have merely told the railways that, in so far as they allow new offices to be built for employing so many thousands of people, they must also allow a similar number of houses to be built to house those people; with the result that no net contribution is made to this problem by the greatest opportunity we have had since the time of the blitz. This is another example of what might have been done.
Thirdly, does the House realise this? Do the Ministers concerned realise this? Planning consents already given in Central London, for which buildings have not yet gone up, will raise the office population in Central London from 825,000 now to 1 million. That is an increase of 175,000 office jobs. If those consents are allowed to go ahead, I see


very little results likely to accrue from all the brave new words we have had this afternoon.
Fourthly, may I bring to the notice of the Minister of Housing and Local Government the rather sad tale of No. 93 Albert Embankment, just across the river? In May, 1963 the L.C.C., rightly I think, refused an application for a 10-floor office block on that site and insisted that flats should be built instead. In October, 1963, the present Minister, after all his protestations in the House, overruled the L.C.C. and gave permission for 10 floors as offices, two as commercial and only two as fiats. These are the hard facts behind all the things we are told in the House.
Therefore, the real cause of the Government's failure over these years has been the cherished illusion that this problem could be solved by incentives in the under-employed regions alone without restraint in the congested areas. It cannot be done. The right hon. Gentleman rightly said in his last speech that we are up against powerful forces. But they are also permanent forces. It is another illusion, on which the Local Employment Act was founded—incidentally, it expires in 1967, whereas the Distribution of Industry Act was permanent—that a temporary effort in this field can be made and then the whole thing given up. If that is done, the truth is that the drift will set in once again.
The right hon. Gentleman asked me what we thought about this new conception of growth areas. I will tell him. I am afraid that this new conception is still partly founded on the basic self-deception I have been talking about; the hope that somehow something called "self-sustaining growth" will avoid the necessity for control at the other end. It will not. Of course, it is true that some new industries will generate others. But the idea that the northern areas can be launched into a permanent orbit of prosperity, and then let go, without any restraint in the South-East and the rest of the country, is just another illusion. It is an illusion which, if we fall into it, is likely to give us another five years of failure like the last.
I warn the Government that, if this failure drags on much longer, the un-

employed in these areas—after all, there are 90,000 in Scotland alone—will not be willing to accept much longer the present miserable level of unemployment benefit which they receive.
Therefore, we on this side found our policy on a fair and square rejection of all this self-deception, and a wholehearted acceptance of the permanent need for both positive planning at one end and negative planning at the other. Since the right hon. Gentleman asked me what we mean to do. I will state our programme for brevity's sake in nine brief practical points.
Point No. 1: schedule all underemployed industrial areas as single comprehensive development areas, without any muddled distinctions between growth areas, on the one hand, and development districts, on the other. Then use all the necessary powers within them wherever they are needed.
Point No. 2: as an emergency crash programme, because we are in an emergency in these areas, build far more adequate-sized advance factories, not just factories of 10,000 sq. ft., as the right hon. Gentleman is building now; and put them in the areas where unemployment is now worse.
Point No. 3: use the existing financial powers, not just to give grants for basic services in the development areas; but let the Board of Trade itself embark once again on a really adequate scheme for the clearance of derelict sites with 100 per cent, grant from the central Government. Let that go not merely for the North-East Coast and Scotland, but to Wales, Merseyside and West Cumberland as well.
Point No. 4: use the I.D.C.s as effectively as they were used before 1951; and get the development areas' and Northern Ireland's share of the total factory building in the country back at least to where it was in the first years after the war.
Point No. 5: tackle the London office problem effectively, either by applying the I.D.C.s to offices, by decisively strengthening local authority powers, or if necessary by establishing building licensing in the congested regions only. And, incidentally, allocate all suitable London railway sites to housing.
Point No. 6: establish a real regional organisation, with regional controllers


of each of the Departments concerned in each regional capital, working regularly together and directly linked once more with the local authority town-planning machinery.
Point No. 7: be prepared to steer to these development areas not just private projects, but new projects launched either in partnership between private and public enterprise, or by public enterprise alone. The Government cannot say that this is impracticable. They have been forced to do it themselves in the case of Wiggins Teape, though they did it in a rather clumsy way. I will tell the right hon. Gentleman that even in East Pakistan there is such a programme now in force, in which new industries are being started by partnership in this way. In this modern age I do not see why Great Britain should lag behind Bengal.
Point No. 8: why not transfer some more central Government offices to the needy areas? If the Ministry of National Insurance could go to Newcastle, under the Labour Government of course, why cannot the National Assistance Board go, and perhaps some parts of the Stationery Office as well? Why cannot the private banks and insurance companies, which have vast bureaucratic organisations, also assist in this campaign? If Fords, Vauxhall and Rootes can go to Scotland and the North-East Coast, I do not see why the Prudential, the Pearl and a few others could not also go.
Point No. 9: organise now a really far-reaching programme for credits to developing Commonwealth countries, to be spent on surplus capacity in the United Kingdom. It is madness that India and Pakistan, for instance, should be prevented by lack of credit from buying the ships, aircraft, steel, and machine tools which they need for their development plans, when surplus unused capacity exists to manufacture those very things in our own under-employed areas.
I know that the Government have at last, under pressure from my hon. Friends, allocated £15 million for this purpose. In my view, the sum ought to be more like £150 million than £15 million.

Mr. McMaster: rose

Mr. Jay: All these things could be done, with sufficient resolution and energy. Indeed, they should have been done by now. But if anyone thinks that they will be done by right hon. Gentlemen opposite, I can only refer him to the last 10 years' miserable record of muddle, vacillation and failure.

5.5 p.m.

Mr. Patrick Wolrige-Gordon: I am glad that the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) clarified his policy in those nine clear points, because his earlier description of it as positive planning at one end and negative planning at the other had me mystified. We from the North-East of Scotland do not complain that Government money is to be fed into the centre of the country. We applaud the proposal of the White Paper to invest so heavily in Central Scotland. We hope that it will do the people and the country good. We applaud my right hon. Friend also for this further step in the modernisation of our country.
But then, we come to the vital question—"What about us?" There are several important questions, arising from the White Paper, concerning every parish pump in every part of the country which is not mentioned. The first is, "Where do we go from here?" At the moment these parts of the country feel inevitably left out in the cold and we got some reflection of this in the anguished tones of the right hon. Member for Battersea. North.
If a man is in a snow-storm one can cover his middle with as much clothing and protection as one likes, but if one forgets his gloves it is quite possible that his fingers will freeze. If one forgets his socks it is possible that his feet will freeze. I do not think that Scotland can afford to lose either its hands or its feet.
Yesterday I asked my right hon. Friend when he expected to publish his development plan for North-East Scotland. I was grateful for his reply, for he confirmed that the Scottish Development Group was making a survey to be completed within the next year or eighteen months and, of course, we can assume that a programme for development will follow that survey, provided the political situation remains unchanged.

Mr. Manuel: The hon. Gentleman knows the drain of population from the seven crofter counties at present. Is he prepared to agree to still more depopulation over another eighteen months?

Mr. Wolrige-Gordon: The hon. Member is trying to make my speech. My next point is to consider what is happening now and what will happen before that further programme is presented. Migration is the most serious problem we have. I believe that the Government will have to change their attitude and policy towards migration, because migration does not end unemployment in any area. It merely conceals it.
Even with the Government's twin gardens of Eden we in the North-East of Scotland have lost, and are losing, men steadily to the centre of Scotland, the north-east of England, the home counties and overseas. From my part of the country it averages about 1,000 men a year.
This is a vicious circle. Lack of opportunities creates unemployment. Unemployment creates lack of opportunities. The wage scale in the South tends to be much higher and, inevitably, skilled men drift towards the South. Then one finds that there is lack of the skilled personnel one needs on which to build the new industries one wishes to attract. The Government must therefore take account of migration when considering policy for development districts. It should be as important a factor as the unemployment figures.
May I ask my right hon. Friend to say more about the Scottish Development Group? How is it composed? How does it operate? These plans must be converted into action. Who will take the action? Will it be the Scottish Development Group, which has composed the plan? If it is, how will the group do it?
As the White Paper makes clear, Government resources will be directed towards the infrastructure, the essential services on which modern industry depends. But the real work of providing employment and making a profit will be done by industry. Will the S.D.G. be able to work with and help industry? For example, will it be independent of

the Government? Will it be able to raise funds, advance loans, raise capital from abroad, advertise in foreign journals and employ its own staff of lawyers, technologists and scientists? Will it be able to do anything and everything to assist industry in its development and offer the necessary inducements to bring it to the development districts?
I ask this because we have experience of all sorts of bodies in the North-East. We have B.O.T.A.C., the Industrial Estate Management Corporation, the Rural Estates Development Association and the Secretary of State's Department. But when people consider our advance in industrialisation in these last years—and there has been a very considerable advance—none of these bodies occur naturally to them. Their minds turn naturally to a board whose main aim is the electrification of our countryside. They think of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board.
I think that we need something more definitive than that now. Grateful as I am for the initiative of that Board we surely need a body that is clearly responsible for the development of the area; unless the Government, apart from supplying the social services, will undertake the active association and co-operation with industry that will be needed.
We in Buchan are grateful for what the Government have been doing to assist us, and even if the Government sat back the people would not. Nevertheless, grants and loans have made a very great difference to us. There is real progress and much healthy development. Development and its future will depend on our communications more than anything else, situated as we are far from the main centres of commerce in the country.
The White Paper says that the contribution that the railways can make to the promotion of economic growth in Central Scotland is indisputable. That is true of the North every bit as much, if not more, and it will become more true when Dr. Beeching has completed his promised transformation of our railway services and we have a truly efficient freight service on our tracks again. I urge my right hon. Friend, when he approaches the development programme


for the North-East of Scotland, to bear in mind the essential need of the railway freight service in any development which is to come.
I conclude with a point put to me by many firms in my constituency. Industry always has to face increased costs, and recently there have been increases in telephone and postal service charges and in National Insurance contributions. One firm—and this is typical—tells me that in order to generate the profit needed to pay these additional costs it would require an additional week's production and sale on the present level of operations.
This kind of cost increase in the nation as a whole is usually accepted philosophically, because there is the general feeling that nothing can be done about it; but it can bear very much more heavily on a firm in a development district which is far removed from the main industrial centres than it does on a firm actually in those centres which does not have the problems of communications and distance to contend with.

5.18 p.m.

Mr. Peter Doig: I am very pleased to be here today but I regret the cause of the by-election which brought me here. The late John Strachey was the longest-serving Member Dundee has ever had. He was very highly respected not only there but throughout the world.
However—to get to the White Paper which, I may say, concerns my constituency very much—I am very pleased that the Government have at long last recognised the need for planning. It is a little unfortunate, however, that as they have rather belatedly come to this point of view, it is inevitable that they make rather a bad job of it. This plan is definitely a bad plan.
The trouble with the country as a whole is that industry is concentrated very largely in the London area and the Midlands. All that the plan seeks to do for Scotland is to reproduce a pocket edition of that situation in Central Scotland. It aims to create a smaller edition of a big thing and will not help the country at all. The plan required will produce not so much growth areas but growth industries in areas of high unemployment.
I recall a message from the Prime Minister to my opponent in the by-election which said:
We will strive to attract more industries to Dundee.
As Dundee is not one of the growth areas but was formerly a development area, I should like to know whether, when industrialists are looking for sites in Scotland, Dundee will be on the list, or whether they will go to growth areas only. If it is to comprise only the growth areas I feel that Dundee should be designated as a growth area.
My reason for saying this is that Dundee has consistently had high unemployment over a long period of years. The Prime: Minister said that:
… we intend to ensure that the long association of jute with Dundee is maintained by an efficient and viable industry.
The dictionary describes a "viable" industry as a self-supporting industry without outside help or protection. This is exactly what the jute industry cannot be, unless it shrinks to less than one-third of its present size. If this is what the Prime Minister means, Dundee will be very much in need of new industry, and particularly growth industry.
The Prime Minister went on to say something which is repeated in the White Paper. He said:
The Tay Road Bridge, on which work has now started, will be of great importance to Dundee. It will provide a direct route to the South.…
Surely the Prime Minister has not read about what his own Government are doing in another Department.
If hon. Members will look at the sum of over £100 million which is to be spent on new roads they will find that there is no connecting road between the Tay Road Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge. When this was drawn to the attention of St. Andrew's House we were told that there was no intention of making this anything more than a communication between Dundee and a small area of Fife. If hon. Members look at the subsidies which the Government gave towards the Forth Road Bridge and they realise that they gave nothing but permission for the Tay Road Bridge, it will be seen that this is the policy and that the Prime Minister is out of step, as of course is also the White Paper.
The next mention made of Dundee is in connection with an airport, which is something for which Dundee has been asking for a long time. All the Government can say about it is that
Dundee's need for regular air communication with the industrial and commercial centres in the South is, along with other airfield requirements for the area, now being urgently considered.
If the Government had any intention of providing Dundee with an airport it ought to have been mentioned in the White Paper, because the White Paper is supposed to be the plan for developing Scotland.
The White Paper says that Dundee is becoming increasingly a part of the central industrial belt of Scotland, but as far as growth areas are concerned Dundee is left out in the cold. It is also left out in the cold where airports are concerned. It seems to me that all this was just a bit of election whitewash to try to persuade people to support the candidate and that the Government have no intention of doing these things. If they have the intention, all this should have been in the White Paper.
I am convinced that the people of Dundee, as was shown by the votes in the by-election, have no faith whatsoever in the Government's vague promises, vague statements and vague inducements. The people have no faith that the Government have any intention of helping Dundee. The only hope for the future of Dundee, for the jute industry, the airport, and the connecting road between the Tay and Forth Bridges, is the speedy return of a Labour Government.

5.25 p.m.

Sir Fitzroy Maclean: I am glad of the opportunity given to me to congratulate the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig) on a vigorous and eloquent maiden speech. Hon. Members are sometimes advised not to make a maiden speech for six months or so. I could not make mine, for reasons beyond my control, until I had been a Member of the House for four years, but the hon. Member's self-assurance and confidence in speaking so soon has been fully justified in the event. It was a very polished performance and

I can assure him that it was a great deal better than a good many speeches we hear from hon. Members who have been here for very much longer.
The hon. Member represents a great city. I was there the other day, and I very much admire it. The hon. Member spoke up vigorously for it. He succeeds a man who was a friend of mine and one for whom I had a great liking and admiration. We were in the House for nearly twenty years together and I had many dealings with him. While gaining a vigorous new Member, Dundee has certainly lost a great representative in John Strachey. The hon. Member was certainly not non-controversial. I hope that we shall hear often from him while he remains a Member of the House but, to be as controversial as he was, I will not say that I hope he remains with us for many years.
I have listened carefully to the debate and in particular to the speech of the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay). It seems to me that hon. and right hon. Members opposite are trying to have it both ways. They attack the White Paper in the same breath as they accuse the Government of stealing their ideas. They said for a long time that the Local Employment Act did not do enough and that it was too negative. The White Paper presents a plan which is essentially positive, and they still attack it. They say, again in the same breath, that it is nothing but an isolated stunt and then go on to show, what is much nearer the truth, that it is the continuation of previous policies.
The right hon. Member for Battersea, North even tried to have it both ways by calling Mr. Hogg Lord Hailsham. I thought that that was an unnecessarily deliberate mistake from such an experienced politician.
Continuing, the right hon. Gentleman reeled off a list of nine or ten points to avoid the accusation that the Labour Party had no policy. But enumerating nine or ten different points is an old trick which takes nobody in. If one looks carefully at them one finds that they do not add to very much. The right hon. Gentleman said that he would schedule all areas. It seems to me that there is not very much difference between doing that and keeping the existing areas, as the


present Government are doing, and then adding growth points to them. It surely comes to very much the same thing. The right hon. Gentleman also talked about going back to before 1951, which is indeed an alarming thought. He talked airily about tackling the London office problem. Finally, he talked about building big advance factories. Nobody pressed more strongly than I did to get an advance factory in the constituency of the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Manuel.)

Mr. Manuel: Nobody pressed harder than I did.

Sir F. Maclean: I am very glad that we have got it.

Mr. Manuel: It has not started yet.

Sir F. Maclean: We both pressed hard for it. The fact remains, however, that there are a good many advance factories in the country which are still not occupied. I do not think that that, by itself, can be regarded as a solution.
What the right hon. Gentleman did not say is whether a Labour Government would resort to the direction of industry and the direction of labour. Of course, that is the 64,000 dollar question, and, as usual, it remains unanswered. It will probably have one or two answers in the course of the debate, but they will probably, as usual, be conflicting answers.

Mr. Manuel: In challenging our programme for the location of industry, the hon. Gentleman should recognise that we say that factories should be placed, either by private enterprise or by Government-sponsored arrangements, in areas of high unemployment. If the factories do not go there, the labour has an economic compulsion to move. Therefore, by our putting the factories there, there will not be the direction of labour; that is, people will not be directed economically to another area.

Sir F. Maclean: If I understood the hon. Gentleman aright, what he is advocating is what the Government are doing already. I hope that he will support the White Paper as enthusiastically as I do myself. In fact, the White Paper represents the culmination of a carefully thought out programme over the years which is already bearing fruit, as my right hon. Friend showed in his opening

speech arid as, no doubt, the Secretary of State for Scotland will further show in winding up.
The Opposition attacked the Local Employment Act in 1960, and they attacked the Act of 1963. They also showed very little enthusiasm for the fiscal inducements which the Chancellor provided in his last Budget. But the fact is that all these Measures are bearing fruit already, and to them must be added the various great projects—here I speak only of Scotland—introduced under the last Secretary of State and under my right hon. Friend who is now Secretary of State, namely, Ravenscraig, Bathgate, the Forth Road Bridge, the Fort William paper mill, and others. As the right hon. Member for Battersea, North was forced to admit, they are already producing results.
It has been said that the Local Employment Act does not do enough, and is too negative. What the present White Paper does is to build on success. It is essentially positive. In its own words, it represents a positive approach to regional economic development. Here it follows the advice of the Toothill Report, which, as far as I remember, did not receive a particularly unfavourable reception opposite. The Toothill Report laid down that the immediate relief of unemployment should not be the only factor in giving assistance to a particular area and that the building up of industrial complexes or centres was an equally important aim. In other words, it suggested that we should do exactly what the Government now propose to do, that is, to build on success. The theory of growth points and growth areas is the theme of the White Paper—that and the provision of the infrastructure which industry needs, housing, schools, communications and so on.
In Committee this morning, I said a few words on behalf of the Scottish tourist industry, and I now return for a minute to that theme. I was very much encouraged to hear my right hon. Friend mention holiday camps as part of the infrastructure. If holiday camps are to be included, hotels ought also to be included, and, surely, they ought to be given the tax benefits which other branches of industry enjoy.
The increased public service investment foreshadowed by the White Paper


means that Scotland will have its fair share of Government public investment in the United Kingdom. This is very much to be welcomed. If ever there was a positive approach, this is it, and yet the Opposition still blindly attack the White Paper. The right hon. Member for Battersea, North was asked a perfectly straightforward question—did he or did he not accept the concept of growth areas? But his answer was not all that clear. What the Opposition must remember is that, unless resources throughout the whole country are fully utilised, the economy as a whole will not develop nearly so fast. That is the point of the Government's policy. What is now proposed will undoubtedly help Scotland as a whole, and that is what matters. The White Paper presents a balanced picture, and this is important, too. It will help both the areas of high unemployment and the areas where there is high industrial potential, each in the most appropriate way.
I have seen it suggested that the plan will benefit only the areas coloured orange on the map. This is certainly not so. Growth points are called growth points for the obvious reason that they are growth points and are intended to grow not only economically but also geographically. It is surprising how many people are incapable of grasping that. As paragraph 122 of the White Paper points out,
it is misleading to regard them as being tightly confined … their beneficial influence will spread widely … investment in the infrastructure services will … take place outside them.
As my right hon. Friend said, the growth will be regional as well as local. I was very glad to hear him say it.
In the constituency of the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire, a growth point has been established at Irvine. I hope that he is grateful for it. I for my part greatly welcome it because I know that it will help the neighbouring towns of Ardrossan, Saltcoats and Stevenson in my constituency and Kilwinning in his, just as much as it will help Irvine itself. In other words, it will be a growth area and, as my right hon. Friend said, "beneficial to the whole region."
Meanwhile—and again this apparently needs emphasising for the benefit of some hon. Members—the provisions of

the Local Employment Act still apply in the development districts. The White Paper, as we have been told, takes nothing away. The Government, by implication, have set themselves a number of targets, the reduction of unemployment, the reduction of the rate of depopulation, and the provision of a substantial number of new jobs every year. It is, as my right hon. Friend said, a unique commitment and one which, in my view, deserves the support of both sides of industry and—though I doubt that it will get it—the support of both sides of the House.

Mr. William Hamilton: Will the hon. Gentleman say precisely where these targets are mentioned? I can see no precision in the target figures in the White Paper, certainly not as regards Scotland.

Sir F. Maclean: That is what I meant when I said "by implication."

5.41 p.m.

Mr. J. Grimond: I join in the congratulations so justly offered by the hon. Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Sir F. Maclean) to the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig) on an excellent maiden speech. I did not think it too controversial. The hon. Gentleman was no more critical of the Government than many hon. Members from Northern Ireland perpetually are. I thought the point particularly apposite when the hon. Gentleman said that we do not want to create in Central Scotland the same troubles which we are now trying to cure in other parts of the country. I am delighted, as one who comes from those parts, that Dundee will have such excellent representation.
I join also, in the remarks made about the late right hon. Member for Dundee, West, Mr. John Strachey. Apart from his personal and most likeable qualities, he was one of the ablest Members of the House. It never seemed to me that he got his deserts. I am amazed that no recognition of his stature was ever given to him, not even, for instance, academic recognition in the form of an honorary degree, of which, I should have thought, he would have been an eminently suitable recipient.
The main thing which struck me about the Secretary of State's speech was that it


should be made now. This is no criticism of the right hon. Gentleman, but it is a criticism of the Government. They have been in office for 12 years, and yet it is only now, apparently, that they are beginning even to think about the problem, a problem which has been pressed upon them for years and years. The Secretary of State told us that he could not do everything at once, but he would tour various regions in the country. No doubt, that will be very agreeable, but, speaking for my own constituency, we have had visits over the years from many Ministers.
We have not suffered from a lack of visits. We have entertained Secretary of State after Secretary of State. We even entertained the Prime Minister, when he was a Minister of State. I begin to wonder what happens when Ministers get back to their offices if we now require still further visits by yet another Minister.
If I may say so, the right hon. Gentleman must not presume upon his highly agreeable character and upon the reception which he receives. He says that no one complains to him. In my constituency, we are extremely polite people. We treat our guests with courtesy, and, what is more, we have now some doubt whether complaints will do any good. Therefore, I do not put much weight on the fact that the right hon. Gentleman has not actually been torn to pieces, or stoned in the places that he has so far visited.
Where do Liberals differ from the Government on this question of regionalism? Fundamentally, we differ because we do not think that the Government proposals go to the heart of the matter. Let me illustrate that in four ways. The Government are concerned to apply some special measures to two regions only, because in them is high unemployment. The Secretary of State made it very clear that he was opposed to starting with any regional structure. He felt that he ought to concentrate on these two regions, and that to do otherwise would be to dilute his effort.
We believe that the government of the country ought to be decentralised, and that a regional structure should be built up covering the whole country. Although we fully agree about the extreme importance of unemployment, we would still hold that view even if there were no unemployment. We still believe that we

need a regional approach to areas like South-East England, though for a different purpose, even where there is no problem of unemployment. The problems of depopulation, the problems of low wages in certain areas, and the problems of lack of confidence in certain areas, are as great as is the problem of overall unemployment.
There are two points about the financial implications. First, a lot of the money already being spent in regions other than those with which the right hon. Gentleman is dealing could, in our view, be spent better. We think that a great deal of Government effort and expenditure in the Highlands, for instance, is not going into development, but is being dribbled out to keep things going; arid that much of it is wasted. Further, a regional structure of government would be very much concerned with differing development in regions, because different regions have different development tasks. In South-East England, for instance, it would be very much concerned with the whole question of town and country planning.
Secondly, the Government are to direct their measures from Whitehall. The Secretary of State touched on this subject, and I know that he will agree that a most important question is how far we should proceed on the present system, and how far we should get more local participation. The fact that he is prepared to see it directed from Whitehall makes me doubt whether the Government appreciate one of the main root causes of the disease. We have to ask why this drive to the South-East has taken place. One of the answers is that it is because we have concentrated so much power and influence in London. It has not happened fortuitously, but because we have a highly-centralised form of Government.
Not only in government, but in industry and social life, power and influence has been centralised in the South-East. The promotion of the indigenous growth of a healthy society in the different regions can be done by not only creating economic growth points, but areas of influence and power in these regions. Otherwise, I think that we shall find this same cycle repeating itself as soon as the special measures are removed. This can only be avoided if we allow decisions to


be taken in the regions, and if the Government themselves give a lead by devolving some of their powers and getting them exercised in the regions.
Thirdly, we must have some national economic plan, as is made very clear by the Crowther Committee. This is open to misunderstanding. When I talk about it, I do not mean a rigid plan. I fully agree with the right hon. Gentleman that it must take account of, and be built on, the differing needs of different regions. We must have some overall economic conspectus, but that at present seems to be rejected by the Government.
Lastly, the Government do not seem aware that all this will require new machinery. It is not only a question of setting targets, but of equipping ourselves with the machinery that can reach them. I want to pursue some of these points of difference with the Government in rather more detail.
Without a plan for all regions, how can we have a proper analysis for any particular region? For instance, the Government propose to reduce the rate of migration from North-East England from 4,000 to 2,500—but why 2,500? Is it because they have looked at the rest of Britain and have decided that the rest of Britain can and should absorb that amount of migration from the North-East? Is it the result of any budget about any potential use of resources in the North-East, such as has been suggested by the Economist? While we are on the question of growth of population, in the centre of Scotland it is given as 600,000, but what effect is that expected to have on Dundee, Aberdeen, the Border country, or the Highlands? I do not see how we can have a sensible policy for these regions unless there is an overall policy for all regions.
Again, how can we bring together all the Reports—the Hall Report, the Beeching Report, the Rochdale Report, the Buchanan Report—unless there is an overall outline of how we see the development of all Britain? Unless those Reports are brought together, they will lose a great deal of their value. I think that the Government have started at the wrong end, and piecemeal. First of all, they get Dr. Beeching to tell them what lines he proposes to close. They do

that before they had the Buchanan Report—far less any industrial plan.
The right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) realised the importance of paragraph 74 of the plan for Central Scotland, but he left out the first sentence, which I find a rather illuminating one. It reads:
Full consideration has been given in drawing up this programme for Central Scotland to the effect of the proposals in Dr. Beeching's report.
That really is topsy-turvy—the whole plan is to depend on whether or not Dr. Beeching is to close railway lines. This may be just a Freudian slip, but it is a revealing one.
Again, one of the most striking features of the Beeching plan is the assumption that the present pattern of industry will continue, and the liner train services all tend to run to London. We know that the Scottish Office was not consulted at all before Dr. Beeching drew up his plan; no wonder that we view with some alarm what is proposed for the Highland railways.
We have this morning a debate in the Scottish Grand Committee, when the Secretary of State interjected to point out that the passenger services in the Highlands would not be closed without reference to the Minister. But he does not seem to appreciate, first, the appalling illogicality of the Scottish Grand Committee discussing the expansion of the tourist industry whilst Dr. Beeching is discussing closing the railway lines somewhere else. Nor does he seem to realise, whatever happens, the appalling effects of uncertainty. How can people make any plans? How can they think of setting up new industries or start attracting people to Scotland if they do no know what stations and railway lines are to be closed?
Now, after 12 years, the Government are dealing with only two areas. How long will it be before they get to the other areas? How long will it be before they can do anything for South-West England of Wales? In the debate on the Gracious Speech, the Secretary of State said that he had not yet reached the South-West. It is rather like the times in darkest Africa when those in authority rode among the natives, showing the flag. Twelve years, and he has not yet got around to the South-West.
We believe, also, that if we are to have healthy development in the regions there must be some participation by the people in the regions themselves. We have pointed out for years, and it is reported on by both Crowther and Buchanan, that the patchwork of local authorities makes any rational town and country planning impossible. I do not deny that, in the early stages, most of the funds will be provided centrally, and that, at this stage, the local participation has, perhaps, to be negative, but the Government should be thinking, for instance, of how they will encourage the process, which is already happening, of county councils forming joint committees, the breakdown of nationalised industries into regional groupings, and so on. All that is going on: it is high time the Government took notice of it, and told the House what they intended to do to encourage it, because it meets a real need.
Here, I must read from the Crowther Report, because it is extremely apt. Paragraph 45 states:
First, there must be a clear statement of national objectives. Regional planning cannot work in isolation. Unless there is a policy on a national basis dealing with the location of industry and population, from which would flow policies in respect of roads, ports, air facilities, etc., regional planning cannot be successful. Without such a policy it is impossible to know what populations and what kinds of employment must be planned for locally, nor the rate at which development can take place, nor can there be any certainty that some uncontrolled drift of events will not reduce all local plans to futility.
That sounds lo me to be all too likely. It is, therefore, really essential that a national plan, built from local plans, should be at the very heart of this movement to regionalism.
The Toothill Report pointed out that the basic trouble in Scotland was the slow rate of growth. The Government have told us that they are aiming at a 4 per cent, annual increase in the gross national product, but what rate is aimed at in the regions? What industries are expected to expand? The service industries in these regions are already expanding, and expanding rather fast. What we now need is expansion in productive industries, but it would be interesting to know how far the Government have been able to analyse what, rate of expansion they

expect to get even in these two particular regions.
The Scottish Council says in its criticism of the Government's proposals that they are not an industrial plan at all, and that is true. They are a plan to improve v/hat is inelegantly called the infra-structure, but they are not an industrial plan. There is very little new in them. The only new thing for industry is that the Government have promised to keep the inducements going a little longer. There are areas shaded on the map, but, as the Secretary of State has carefully pointed out, these areas will not get any special treatment industrially. This is like something from "1984"; all areas are being developed, but some are being developed faster than others. But we do not know why. There is no directive, no timetable.
Looking at the infrastructure, it is true—and here, again, I agree with the right hon. Member for Battersea, North—that allowing for rise in prices and increase in national wealth, there is to be no vast improvement. The amount spent on roads in Central Scotland is to be increased from £83 million to £101 million—but I hope that this will not be at the expense of other areas in Scotland. What effect will that have on the total sum allotted to roads? I do not believe that we have suitable machinery for administering even the present scheme of grant and loan, and I therefore have even more doubts about whether the machinery is capable of doing the much more radical job we want to see done.
I want to illustrate the present difficulties and delays of getting grants and help even under the present Acts. A furniture-making firm called Shapland and Petters wanted to set up a factory at Barnstaple. It was agreed with the Board of Trade that it would be reasonable for the firm, I understand, to apply for a loan of £150,000. It withdrew its labour from two areas of high unemployment One was Ilfracombe, where the rate of unemployment is 10 per cent. Six months went by and eventually the project fell through. During this time the firm supplied an immense amount of information.
Hon. Members will know from their own knowledge that the amount of information which is needed is very great,


and for small firms this creates a difficulty. However, it having been suggested that the firm should get £150,000, this was eventually reduced to £125,000—at one time it went down to £100,000—and the firm felt that it could not proceed and the project fell through. This means that 450 men will not get jobs, and if they are paid out of taxation at £6 a week the sum will come to very nearly as much as the amount which would have been spent on this factory.
It is essential that there should be speed of decision. To my mind, it is an entirely new form of activity, and I want to press this on the Secretary of State. No one suggests that the Government Departments are not most expert at doing their traditional jobs, but when it comes to taking decisions over industrial matters, I believe that they lack sufficient personnel with industrial and business experience.

Mr. Heath: I have studied this case very carefully myself. There is a great deal of information which ought to be given—

ROYAL ASSENT

6.1 p.m.

Message to attend the Lords Commissioners:

The House went:—and, having returned;

Mr. SPEAKER reported the Royal Assent to:

1. Kenya Independence Act, 1963.
2. Zanzibar Act, 1963.
3. Bahama Islands (Constitution) Act, 1963.

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Question again proposed, That the words proposed to be left out stand part of the Question.

6.12 p.m.

Mr. Grimond: When I was about to be doubly interrupted, I was going on to the question of the staff at the right hon. Gentleman's disposal. Does the right hon. Gentleman want to interrupt?

Mr. Heath: The right hon. Gentleman had been citing a particular case of an application for loan assistance. He

remarked that the Board of Trade ought to have staff more suitable for dealing with these items. I know of this particular case and I have studied it very carefully. It was for a loan of a considerable sum of money, which had to be handled by the Board of Trade Advisory Committee, an independent body with a very skilled professional staff fully equipped to deal with these matters.
I know that the firm itself has paid tribute to the excellence of the accountants which helped it in dealing with this whole matter. It is the Committee's responsibility to deal with these things thoroughly, as it did in this case, and then give its advice, and it is up to the firm to decide whether to accept the arrangement suggested. There have been some adaptations to these arrangements since the original proposal was put forward by B.O.T.A.C. and I was hoping that in these circumstances the firm would feel able to go ahead.

Mr. Grimond: We all regret that this firm has not felt able to do so. Its point was that it felt that there had been a change in attitude and that there had been delay.
It is difficult to deal with these matters without appearing to criticise the staff of Departments. No one wants to do that and what I am saying is not intended as a criticism. If what I said earlier gave that impression, I certainly withdraw it. The excellent civil servants who serve us all do so extremely well. My point is that the job now is quite different from what it was 10, or 20, or 30 years ago, and from my experience I doubt whether Government Departments have the machinery, statistics, or export knowledge required to deal with development problems which are now constantly being put into their laps.
There should be far more exchange of staff between industry and the Civil Service, and industry must give the Civil Service far more statistics about its intentions than is now the case.

Sir Harmar Nicholls: Is not the right hon. Gentleman being a little contradictory? He has just made the very reasonable observation that only so much can be done with the staff available; but a moment earlier he suggested


that we should go into other regions and extend and stretch ourselves even further. We have to face up to the human frailties which go with this. It looks as though the Government are making a sensible allocation of their forces.

Mr. Grimond: That might have been so if the Government had not been in office for 12 years, but they did not come into office yesterday. Even now they do not tell us whether, if they think it is desirable, they will create the necessary machinery.
The Secretary of State told us how he hopes that his proposals will be carried out. They are to be carried out by committees of civil servants in the regions, with a committee in Whitehall. This is not enough. The Crowther Committee strongly made the point that proper development agencies are needed in the regions with executive powers to do such things as to hold land. I am sure that the Crowther Committee was right. This is something for which I have pressed in respect of the Highlands for years and years. There must be an executive Highland authority if we are to have proper development in the Highlands. I would be grateful to know that the Government have not wholly shut their minds to this idea, because it appeared from what the Minister of Transport said that he rejected this Crowther recommendation, which is crucial. If that recommendation is rejected, grave doubts are cast over how far the Government will be able to implement any of their proposals.
Lastly—and I shall be very brief after that half-time interval—there are two other matters about which I want to ask questions. It is not only the total overall lack of employment which is serious in these districts of unemployment, but the lack of employment for cleverer and more enterprising people. The steady movement of head offices of every sort to London has beheaded whole regions of Britain. It is now not enough to give them economic aid, because there is no one to use it, and all that happens is that these areas have branch offices and branch factories which are the first to be closed in any recession, all the top people having gone South to London. Why these areas are depressed and why people will

not stay in them is of fundamental importance and is a social as well as an economic question. Opportunities for the brighter boys leaving school are not available in these districts.
Two engineering firms in the South which I have visited lately have told me, when I have asked them why they do not work in the North, that there are no suitably trained people in the North and that trained people in the South will not go to the North. We must be profoundly disappointed with the retraining facilities which are offered by the Government. Of 25,000 redundancies, only 1,700 men, 7 per cent., are getting retraining. If we want to build up these areas and build them up to the top level, we have to give far more attention to retraining and to building up the pool of skilled manpower in the areas of the North.
I should like to be told a little more about the Location of Offices Bureau. There are 30,000 new office jobs in London every year, and that is one of the reasons why the regions are losing so many of their top people and why there is intolerable congestion in the London area.

The Minister of Housing and Local Government and Minister for Welsh Affairs (Sir Keith Joseph): The commonly accepted figure is 15,000. I wonder where the right hon. Gentleman gets his figure of 30,000.

Mr. Grimond: I get it from the Minister's own White Paper. There are 40,000 new jobs in London and only 25 per cent of them are industrial.

Sir K. Joseph: The figure of 15,000 refers to Central London. That has been the trend over the last few years and Central London is the key area.

Mr. Grimond: I was talking about the London region. My figure comes from the Minister's White Paper.
The Fleming Report recommended that certain Government offices should move out of London, and I believe that the Government have accepted that 27,000 civil servants should go. But where will they go? Will they go far, or will they merely move to the outskirts of London or to the Midlands? Are they not only the lowest-paid office


workers? How many whole Departments will go out and how many heads of Departments? If the Government want to build up the regions and to set an example, it is not enough to move out the bottom people. It must be whole offices. I do not see why this should not be done and I have never been able to understand why some of the nationalised industries should not move out. The suggestion that the National Coal Board should conduct its affairs from one of the coal mining regions is very sensible.
Another point made by the Toothill Report in this respect is of prime importance. People who have gone to the North have said that they find it almost impossible to find opportunities to talk to people in their own line of business or to customers, and they insist that they must be able to do so but are hampered by travel difficulties. So far as I know, there are only three Herald aircraft serving all the internal air services of Scotland, and yet air travel is not mentioned in the White Paper.
The Government should give some attention to proposals made by Colin Clarke for differentials in taxation in different areas. A differential payroll tax or in contributions is suggested. This would help the labour intensive industries to get away from the congested areas of the South, while for the capital intensive industries, which are probably the growth industries, there is a strong case for moving more of the research organisations away from the South-East. This suggestion was made by the hon. Member for Middlesbrough, West (Dr. Bray) and I have never seen a conclusive answer against its being done. I know that it happens to some extent, but a bigger scale is necessary.
I must confess that I am disappointed with these White Papers. It can be counted for something that even in their twelfth year of office the Government are considering these proposals in this context at all, but even so it is for only two regions. There are other regions with high unemployment and depopulation problems, like Wales and Scotland, which are ignored. These proposals are not new, but are merely old proposals brought back as a patchwork and now designated as policy.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Michael Noble): In his party's Amendment, the right hon. Gentleman talks about
democratic control of regional planning agencies".
I am not certain what that means and I am sure that the House is not, either. It would help if the right hon. Gentleman would tell us.

Mr. Grimond: I thought that I had dealt with that in my speech.
Shortly, the Government should take note of the fact that the county councils have joint committees and ought to have a rôle in this planning. Are the Government to take no notice of recommendations that at least some negative control should be exercised at regional level by people who live in the regions, or is this to be a purely bureaucratic, an imposed, control, all decided in Whitehall?

6.23 p.m.

Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley: The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) made the point that the measures were to be directed from Whitehall. I began to wonder whether he had read the White Paper on Central Scotland. I am sure that he must have done so, in which case he will recollect that the regional organisation for Central Scotland is to be directed by the Scottish Development Group, a body operating not from Whitehall, but from Scotland itself. I agree with much of what he said about the democratic organization of regionalism and I shall hope to show that in what might be a somewhat critical speech.
First, may I say that I welcome the appointment of my right hon. Friend as Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development. It seems to me an appointment of exactly the right man for an imaginative assignment.
Despite official discouragement and growing and increasing congestion the great conurbations of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and so on—those vast city regions, which are erupting with explosive force over the surrounding countryside—are continually growing. On the other hand, the working populations of the more distant parts of


our island, particularly in Scotland, are continuing to decline. I hope and believe that my right hon. Friend will conceive it to be one of his primary tasks to do something to correct this unbalance in our national economy.
I welcome also the White Papers which, as The Times in a leading article on 15th November wrote, gave
firm expressions of faith in the vigour and vitality of the areas.
I welcome particularly the White Paper on Central Scotland. The fact that I wish to voice a criticism should not obscure the fact that I welcome the conception and initiative of the White Paper. I know that a great many hon. Members wish to speak and therefore I propose to confine myself, briefly and substantially, to one point and to one aspect only. It is one where I think we are in danger of going wrong—here I find myself in some measure of agreement with the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland—in our failure to recognise the need for a regional organisation to prepare and implement the regional plan in the White Papers.
I have long held the view—I have expressed it before in this House and elsewhere—that land planning in Britain should be related to three main levels at which problems are presented. There is the local level, for which purpose the present local planning authorities are adequate; there is the regional level where problems which cannot be tackled adequately within individual local government areas should be dealt with; and thirdly, there is the national level at which national policy is determined.
National policy for the Scottish central region is laid down in the White Paper Cmd. 2188 and, in my submission, ought to be implemented through a regional plan. The central Scottish region covers no fewer than twelve local planning areas. It covers two counties of cities and ten or eleven county council areas. Yet there is no proposal, as I understand it, to invite the co-operation of any local representative in the formulation of the regional plan.
Paragraph 160 recognises that many interests are involved in carrying out the programme, local authorities; new town corporations, of which four in Scotland,—and perhaps a fifth if Irvine is to be designated, as many of us hope—lie

within the ambit of the area covered by the White Paper; nationalised industries, and the Scottish Council (Development and Industry). But there is no proposal to bring a single representative of any of these interests into the planning and administration of this regional area.
I dare say that many of my right hon. and hon. Friends have read the P.E.P. publication which was issued on 14th October, A development plan for Scotland. On page 419 it states, and I agree with this statement:
Even if there existed a central planning body in Scotland with complete knowledge of the needs and industrial resources, of manpower and employment, of transport needs and facilities, of housing and other special requirements of every locality in Scotland, even so it would require local units of administration, not to mention expert and informed local opinion and a wide measure of public support.
I am well aware that it would be wrong and indeed useless and futile to make this criticism about the lack of a proper democratic regional organisation without saying first what I think is the present organisation, because I may be wrong about it—we are not told clearly what it is—and, secondly, what I think it ought to be. I think the present organisation is that the Scottish Development Group, comprising representatives of the Scottish Development Department and other Government Departments concerned have made a plan. They may, presumably, from time to time be presided over—this is to some extent guesswork—on rare occasions by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland; sometimes by the Under-Secretary of State responsible for matters of the Scottish Development Department; but normally—again this is guesswork—by a senior official who generally, I think, would be the Secretary of the Scottish Envelopment Department.
I may be quite wrong, and if so I should be glad to be informed, but if this is the set-up, or if it is anything like the set-up, I consider it wrong. In Scotland we have a splendid chance to try out on an experimental basis a regional organisation which might prove a model for the whole country. The kind of body which I wish to see I would term a regional planning authority. It would be an executive body with a chairman nominated by the Secretary of State. Such a man would be difficult


to find, because he must be a man of vision and energy, with a wide knowledge of land-use planning and of the needs of industry. It would probably have to be a part-time appointment, because such a man would have many other interests. There are not many such men, but I think that a search would have to be made.
Perhaps three-fifths of the members of the authority should be direct representatives of the local authorities concerned, appointed by those authorities and by the new town corporations within the area. The other two-fifths should be independent members. I am thinking of the word "independent" as being in italics. The independent members would be appointed by the Minister. Some would represent special interests, of which transport and industry are obvious examples.
An authority such as this ought to have a technical staff including a full-time general manager who, if possible, should be seconded from the Scottish Development Department. I am sure that the authority would look to the Scottish Development Group for help and advice in a variety of ways. The first task facing this authority would be to prepare a survey and a planning report of the whole area in the light of the Buchanan Report. There would have to be an analysis of probable traffic flows and needs throughout the area and of the contribution which public transport can and ought to make to the solution of that problem.
I am being critical today. There are many things which I could say that I like about this policy, but I want to concentrate on the things which I think are wrong.
The White Paper contains an admirable plan which is beautifully executed. But it omits any indication of the railway pattern. There are roads and everything else, but not a single railway is shown. It is ironic that at a time when Buchanan has shocked us into a realisation of the possibility of the sheer weight of numbers of motor vehicles on our roads grinding all movement to a standstill, Beeching should be seeking to pare away, and even to close down, large sections of our railways. This problem must be looked at closely in

respect of the central Scottish region by the kind of organisation which I think that my right hon. Friend ought to appoint.
There is also the question of green belts or, at least, a green background to the industrial areas. Unless these things are thought about, there is a real danger of the creation of a continuous built-up area which in a few years would extend from Edinburgh to Glasgow. None of us can view that with equanimity. The Times leader to which I have referred states that the region remains largely a paper concept and no real concrete expression of regional unity is proposed. This is true. What is also true is that the machinery of administration proposed is basically a Civil Service structure under political direction.
My right hon. Friend the Minister, in outlining the proposed administrative structure for the north-east of England said that he was not being rigid about it. I earnestly hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland will be able to tell the House that his mind is not closed to the establishment of a regional planning authority, which would act within the framework of the White Paper plan and under the expert guidance of the Scottish Development Group; which would be fortified by the local knowledge and experience of appointed representatives of local authorities and new town corporations in the area and nominated representatives of the Scottish Council (Development and Industry) which has done so much for Scotland in this regard.

6.38 p.m.

Mr. Joseph Slater(Sedgefield): I am delighted that tonight we are debating these White Papers dealing with problems of development in Scotland and also in the north-east of England. Eighteen months ago representatives from the North-East were able to have what was an all-night debate on the problems in the North-East which had arisen because of the lack of policy of the present Government.
I have never been able to understand why a Minister with special responsibilities was appointed to go to the North-East to report to his Cabinet colleagues on the conditions prevailing in that area, but it appears that as a result of his


Report—which, apparently, we are not to be allowed to see—the Government have introduced this White Paper.
I think that we must recognise that the main interest of the White Paper is directed to the eastern part of our region. The idea is to make it a growth zone as a long-term policy. I suppose that we ought to be grateful that after this long period of agitation the North-Eastern area is to receive some recognition from the Government, but there is one thing that the plan does not do, and here I expect to carry all hon. Members representing North-East constituencies with me. It does not give us any immediate relief. The White Paper says that at least 80,000 people have left our region, and it seems likely that this process will continue. I cannot see this flow being abated unless something is done immediately.
It is well known that for many years the prosperity of the region has been based on a few major industries. Everyone knows the situation in the coal mining industry today, and over the past three or four years the steel and heavy engineering industries have been in the doldrums, but no doubt they will recover in time.
The chemical industry at Billingham, which is in my constituency, has been expanded, but what we have to remember is that although technical advances arising out of research and development in this modern age enable us to make considerable increases in output, they do not provide a proportionate increase in the manpower employed. For example, it may cost about £25,000 to develop and improve the I.C.I, plant at Billingham, yet that expenditure may provide employment for only one extra person.
Because of that, I am glad that the Government have put forward positive proposals for the building of new schools, hospitals and roads in the region. The highway programme announced by the Government is all to the good, but it must be remembered that even the building of roads does not substantially reduce the number of men who are unemployed in the region. During the 1930s the building of roads provided employment for substantial numbers of men, and in the North-East we were able to take many men away

from the employment bureau and give them what we used to call 26 weeks' work. But we cannot do that now under a programme of highway development because of the great advances that have been made in the construction of new roads.
We appreciate that these programmes are for a long period of time, but we cannot overlook the fact that we have more than 4 per cent, unemployed in the region, and that in some areas it is even higher, particularly in The Hartlepools. We have to decide between the expenditure of social capital, and the expenditure of industrial capital.
Since the end of the war the Board of Trade agency in the North-East has developed its trading estates, but this development has not been fast enough. In my area there is the Aycliffe Trading Estate, which is specially mentioned in the White Paper. Over the years I have asked for this estate to be developed to provide employment for the men in Newton Aycliffe who have become unemployed due to pit closures in the area. We are now told that the trading estate is to be developed and that the population of Newton Aycliffe is to be increased to 45,000, but some local authorities in the area are not in favour of the Government's policy to increase the population of this new town from 20,000 to 45,000. Where do the Government expect the population to come from? I ask this so that the people in the area can get some idea of the Government's policy for this new town.
The Aycliffe Trading Estate was taken over by the Government in 1945. Prior to that it had been a Royal Ordnance factory. In 1940, the Government decided to develop a site of 800 acres, and in 12 months the factory built on that site was in production. It expanded rapidly until nearly 20,000 men and women were employed there. All this was done during the war, and the employees, who worked a three-shift system, were drawn from a radius of 12 miles. My point in drawing the attention of the House to this factory is to show that if the Government had given this area the same attention as was given to the needs of the nation during the war we would not today be faced with the heavy unemployment that there is in the area.
The Government must be condemned for their lack of consideration and the time that has been wasted in dealing with this problem. My colleagues and I have never let up in our desire to see that something was done to help relieve the unemployment. We have known what has been happening in the area, and we have known that if the Government did not do something positive many areas around the North-East would become derelict.
I turn now to that part of the White Paper which deals with Tees-side. I am glad that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade is present. The White Paper says, in paragraph 53, that there are only 50 acres of Board of Trade sites available and that the Government
have decided to fill the gap by developing a new industrial estate of some 300 acres on the south side of the Tees-side conurbation …
Why have the Government chosen the south side? Why not the north bank? In this area there is adequate land available for development. What is the matter with Portrack Lane from Stockton to Billingham and The Hartlepools? Or, to come to the other side, is the Minister aware that, according to my information, land on the Urley Nook Road, at Eaglescliffe, has already been reserved for industrial development? I am not objecting to what has already been done on the south side of the Tees, but I think that the Government ought to bear in mind the availability of sites for development on the north side of the Tees, which could have been just as easily developed. I hope that they will have another look at this.
It ought to be remembered that Billingham, even with the I.C.I. factory, has been carrying a high rate of unemployment, and the last figures that I remember, before it was made a development district, was that it had 64 per cent, unemployed. At one time, I.C.I. was carrying up to 18,000 people in that factory. It is now down to 14,000. Many of the people working at I.C.I. at Billingham and the Furness shipyards come from the Stockton and The Hartlepools areas. Therefore, expansion could easily have taken place along the front which I have mentioned within a radius of 8 miles.
It may be that the Government decided on this site because of the Boundary Commission's proposals for the greater Tees-side. This is the all-purpose authority that we have heard so much about. It may be that the Government have made up their minds about this and that is why they are proposing to develop the south side. Even if such is the case, I want to bring before the House the needs of the population regarding unemployment in the area in which they live, and which ought to be borne in mind. I could find very many suitable sites within the rural areas of Stockton and Sedgefield, which could easily be developed.
My last comment is about the airport facilities referred to in the White Paper. I am pleased to see that there is every possibility of the Middleton St. George R.A.F. Station being turned into a civil airport for Tees-side. No one has played a greater part in this matter than myself and I am not saying that with any sense of bravado. I have taken deputations to the Minister to see whether more accommodation could be made available for civil airlines. I hope that the Government will give every support to this and not let this opportunity pass.
One of the greatest obstacles—I think that the House ought to be reminded of this, and the Minister of Housing and Local Government—is that when we had what was known in the area as the Greatham Airport, it was operated on land belonging to the West Hartlepools Borough Council. Recently, it went out of commission on Tees-side because the Government were not prepared to give us accommodation for Customs facilities. I ask the Minister of Housing and Local Government and his right hon. Friend to give to the Tees-side local authorites which are now considering taking it over those facilities for Customs which are necessary for civil aviation.
Tees-side is in need of facilities for air travel and I hope that the provision of Customs facilities will not be allowed to stand in the way. I am convinced that if the Government had heeded the warning received over the years concerning the North-East we would not be faced with the serious problem of unemployment and of families who have had to uproot themselves from the area where they have been born to find employment.
The former Minister of Fuel and Power, in response to a Question that I asked him, said that there were only two alternatives concerning the men who were more or less unemployed. One was that they could have employment in other areas of the country where mining work was available or sign on the unemployment register. We have been talking about the direction of factories, but we have had the principle operating, because of the position we have been in, of an indirect form of direction being given to our mining colleagues.
Let no one run away with the idea that that has not been operating. It has been operating because there has been no other form of employment for them available within the area. Many of our young people are having to trudge the streets because of the lack of employment. Only those who have experienced this, and lived with it, can understand what it can do to a man. I said on a previous occasion that men do not shout out for work for shouting's sake, but because of their obligations to their wives and families, and only when we get a change of heart and a change of Government, do I believe that our people will receive greater security. We have often heard the saying,
We live in deeds, not years … not in figures on a dial".
We have not had those deeds, over the last 12 years, from the Government to give our people that sense of security which they ought to have. When the time comes to pass judgment on the policies that the Government have been pursuing over the past 12 years—the stop-go policy—I believe that the people in the North-East will give their answer.

6.57 p.m.

Mr. A. Bourne-Arton: I am glad to be able to join with the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Slater) in his plea that Middleton St. George should be developed as an international airport with customs facilities. I pay tribute to the work that the hon. Member has done. He has been an example to us all in the North-East in pressing for this. The hon. Gentleman is entitled to speak for his own constituency and I should not like to butt in except to say that I think he was a little gloomy about the development already taking place in that part of the constituency,

Aycliffe, which borders on mine and where many of my constituents work. I am sure that he will welcome the proposal in the White Paper as much as I do that that trading estate and community should enlarge from 20,000 to 45,000 people.
For once I break my normal rule in these debates and I will not make an entirely parochial and constituency type of speech. I have done that several times in recent debates and it bores other people immoderately and it does not even interest my constituents because my speeches do not get reported. Apart from that I hope that this debate will not develop into one in which we all plug our own constituency matters.
I should like to make one point. The hon. Member for Sedgefield has touched on the division which has already appeared in this debate between the two sides of the House; at least between me and several other hon. and right hon. Members of the Opposition. It is this: the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay), when stating what the policy of the Opposition would be, gave as his first point—I hope that I am not misquoting him—that the policy of the Opposition in these matters would be based upon places were unemployment now exists.
This seems to me to be a fundamental error. It seems utterly wrong to have to approach a problem of this kind as if it were a simple mathematical business of saying, "Here are X number of people who are unemployed, and there is a forecast that Y number of other people will become redundant in the foreseeable future. Therefore, X plus Y jobs must be planted in that area." The approach in the White Papers, which I am sure is the right one, is totally different. It is as different as the approaches of respective gardeners representing hon. Members on this side of the House and hon. Members opposite. If the Opposition gardener saw a flowering shrub withering and dying, his policy would be to put in a new plant or seedling in the same spot, whereas the wise Conservative gardener would put it into a plot of good, deep soil, alongside the position of the dying shrub. He would plant it in a spot where it would grow and thrive, and eventually overshadow the other shrub.


That is the difference of approach between hon. Members on this side and hon. Members opposite.

Mr. Cyril Bence: Did the hon. Member oppose the Local Employment Bill when it was introduced?

Mr. Bourne-Atron: No. But, unlike some people, I try to learn by experience. The Act has been successful in certain respects. I am deeply grateful, as are my constituents, for the benefits that it has brought to Darlington. I had the good fortune to be a member of the Estimates Committee which examined this problem, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton). We learnt that it was not a sound and satisfactory yardstick to try to balance Government expenditure and investment against jobs immediately created. That was the conception behind the Act, and it is still apparently the general approach of the Opposition.
I know that what is required is a general stimulus of areas, and that we must plant our new industries, and foster and encourage them, in places where they have the best chance of developing. This is important, not only because of what is happening in areas like mine, which is faced with the immediate problem. The way in which the problem is tackled in the North-East, in Central Scotland and other special areas, will set a pattern. I hope that we shall learn, from the way in which we tackle the problems there, how to approach the next few decades in terms of the whole country.
This is not a once-for-all operation in the North-East, in Scotland or anywhere else. This is an operation which is growing with us. I promised that I would not be provincial, but we all know that we can foresee at any moment of time where redundancies will occur in our own constituencies, and make estimates of how many jobs ought to be created. The question whether to bring in an industry which does not have high productivity—that is to say, an industry which employs a large number of men in proportion to the value of the goods it produces—or whether to bring in one which is modern and efficient, and has therefore better long-term prospects, and is likely to in-

crease and stimulate the whole economy of the area in the long run, is something which divides the thinking of hon. Members on this side of the House from the thinking of hon. Members opposite.
I am for the long-term stimulus of the whole region. That is why I welcome the new conception in the White Papers, of a large growth area, rather than a collection of isolated places—the conception that we had a few years ago and which we thought might work, in which we could mop up isolated pockets of unemployment one by one. That is not the answer. As I find my immediate problems being solved, and as the hon. Member for Sedgefield finds his immediate problem being solved, by incoming industry, certain industries in our areas will discover that they are inefficient, and that they must be modernised. This will cause redundancy, and so the process goes on.
If the commercial and economic future of this country is as bright as I believe, this is something that we shall live with for the rest of our lives, and we must get it right. I am sure that the proper approach is that which is laid down in the White Papers—that we should do our best to foster growth in the best places—and not the approach which lays it down that we must go round with our sponge, trying to mop up unemployment wherever it exists.
I do not want to take up any more time. I have been fortunate in being able to express my views at greater length on other occasions. I commend the approach which the White Papers make, and I am deeply grateful to all my right hon. and hon. Friends at the Board of Trade for the splendid announcement that has been made this afternoon.

7.6 p.m.

Mr. William Hamilton: I am not sure where the hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Bourne-Arton) stands. In one breath he says that he applauds the successes of the Local Employment Act, and then, in the next, he says, "Thank heaven it has gone". The hon. Gentleman was a member of the Estimates Committee, with me, when we made it quite clear that the Board of Trade was not sure what had happened as a result of the Local Employment Act. It could never tell us, and


steadily resisted telling us, exactly how many jobs had been created as a result of the Act.
We made it clear in our Report that at the very time when increased investment in the development districts was required, investment in them was at its lowest. That is the condemnation of the working of the Local Employment Act. That is one reason why the Government have produced these White Papers. This is a very belated conversion on the part of the Government to what I regard as purposive and positive planning.
I go along with the hon. Member in saying that we must concentrate on areas of growth, without too much regard to the actual percentage rates of unemployment. But the hon. Member knows that the Government base their policy upon the Local Employment Act. Their yardstick is the figure of 4½ per cent. unemployment, imminent or now prevailing, or likely to prevail. That was the yardstick which the Government defended adamantly three or four years ago. These White Papers simply represent the latest of a large number of bites at this cherry.
The problem of unemployment in the areas designated under the Act, in 1960, remains as intractable as ever. I doubt whether the hon. Member, or any member of the Government, would say that the overall employment position in the areas that we are now discussing is any better. Indeed, it is worse now than it was when the Government brought in the 1960 Act. Whatever may be said of the present policies contained in the White Papers, the fact is that the effects of them cannot and will not be immediate.
As I understand, the White Papers comprise a list largely of long-term measures, very few of which can bear fruit within the lifetime of the present Government. The Government will last at the most for another six months. To that extent the promises contained in the White Papers are "jam tomorrow". Meanwhile, hon. Members on this side, at least, are deeply concerned about the hardship and unemployment that currently exist. We now have more than 90,000 unemployed in Scotland, before the hardness of winter is on us. With wives and families, this means that more than 300,000 people are now living on

the dole in Scotland. They cannot hope for anything from these White Papers.
The Prime Minister spoke of us being one nation. He should stick his head in a bucket before he talks too much about that, as long as this problem exists in Scotland. I appeal to the Government to show an earnest of their good intentions by immediately giving a substantial increase in unemployment benefit. This would inject a good deal of purchasing power into the economy at the point where it is needed most. That would be an added incentive to the Government to get rid of the problem of unemployment, because to the extent to which they got rid of it they would relieve themselves of the burden of increased unemployment benefit.
The basic concept of the White Papers is regional economic development, fostered obviously by more liberal doses of public investment. There is no longer any nonsense about the 4½ per cent. yardstick of unemployment under the 1960 Act. There is no longer any twaddle about the stop list, scheduling, descheduling and rescheduling—the stop and go. It is a complete reversal. The Government have nothing to learn from the Communists about somersaults. The Secretary of State for Industry and Trade went out of his way to point out today that there is none of this. From now on there is to be no scheduling, rescheduling or descheduling.

Mr. Bourne-Arton: Is the hon. Gentleman's argument that, although there were defects in the operation of the 1960 Act, the Government ought to stick to it in the interests of consistency?

Mr. Hamilton: Not at all. The Labour Party voted against it. The difference between us and right hon. and hon. Members opposite is that we forecast that it was the wrong policy and that it would have to be modified. The Tories said that this was the solution to the problem. Now that it has failed, and obviously failed, they say, "Although it was a wonderful success in 1960, nevertheless we will stop it and introduce something else". This is nonsense. It will not deceive anybody, certainly not anybody in Scotland. The hon. Member for Darlington represents a marginal seat. He will not be here very much longer.

Mr. Bourne-Arton: Wait and see.

Mr. Hamilton: I belong to the North-East. I know very well what the reaction of the North-East will be to these White Papers.
The idea of growth areas and major growth areas is acceptable. I am never quite sure exactly what the difference is. A distinction is drawn in the White Paper between "growth areas" and "major growth areas". The idea is certainly acceptable, but I should like to know by what objective or scientific criteria the boundaries were drawn. My right hon. Friend the Member for Batter-sea, North (Mr. Jay) drew attention to this. The whole point of drawing boundaries around these areas presumably is to give the people inside these areas preferential treatment over the people outside.
This is the whole point of differentiating the growth areas from the rest of the community. The Secretary of State did not make this at all clear. I want the Secretary of State for Scotland to make it abundantly clear that there are clear and well-defined advantages accruing to the areas specified as growth areas as distinct from areas outside, including development districts.
I make this point because the map for the Central Fife area shows that the boundaries seem to exclude many parts of the County which are scheduled as development districts. It is not clear, certainly not to the local authorities, why those areas were excluded. Anstruther, in the constituency of the hon. Member for Fife, East (Sir J. Gilmour), is excluded from the growth area. Does the hon. Gentleman know whether the Central West Fife growth area will get preferential treatment over Anstruther, which is a development district outside it? I doubt whether he does.

Sir John Gilmour: I have written to my right hon. Friend on this point and I hope to get the answer shortly.

Mr. Hamilton: That bears out what I am saying. The hon. Gentleman does not know. The White Paper does not make clear exactly what the difference is.
Whilst I am on Fife, I will mention the question of the tolls on the bridge. The White Paper makes it clear that we

are to have wonderful modern transport, but the tolls on the bridge are to stay. I have heard on very good authority—I should like the Secretary of State to say whether it is true—that the proposed tolls which he has in mind are twice the rates currently being paid on the Dartford-Purfleet Tunnel. If this is so, instead of the flat rate of 2s. 6d. which the joint board has suggested for everything, the tolls would be 5s. for a motor car, 8s. for a medium goods vehicle, and 12s. for a heavy goods vehicle. I have been given these figures on fairly good authority. I should like the Secretary of State for Scotland either to confirm them or categorically deny them. Indeed, I should like him to go much further and say that he will get rid of all this nonsense about tolls.

Mr. Noble: If it will help the hon. Gentleman, I can deny that at once.

Mr. Hamilton: We will see when the right hon. Gentleman makes his proposals after he has had representations from the joint board. Nevertheless, whatever the tolls are, the principle of charging tolls on the only major road coming in from the south to what is now regarded as a major growth area is a contradiction in terms. It is a flat contradiction of what the Government are aiming at in the White Papers.
I understand that the Scottish Council is to make representations—I am now making them—as to the road system in the Leslie, Markinch, Glenrothes area, where there is no improvement to be made other than on the main road north from Inverkeithing to Milnathort. There is to be no trunk road link between Fife and the New Tay Bridge. The right hon. Gentleman should give attention to this.
The new towns in Scotland, and indeed those in the North-East, figure prominently—rightly so; I am not complaining—in the context of the growth areas. When the concept of the new towns was introduced by the Labour Government, there were an awful lot of jeers, jibes and taunts thrown at the Labour Government by the Tory Party. The Tories regarded it as a Utopian ideal that would never get off the ground. Indeed, I remember Lord Hinching-brooke, as he then was, saying that it was the introduction of the Fascist State


when the Labour Party talked about new towns.
It is now generally recognised by the Government and by everybody outside the House that this was one of the most imaginative and most successful social concepts in the post-war era. My complaint is that the Government have recognised this all too belatedly. For many years they did nothing about it. I suggest that, if the Government want to create more growth areas, they should set about creating many more new towns and increasing the social and cultural amenities in the existing new towns, because they have been a wonderful success. A largely increased measure of prosperity would accrue to Scotland if we had two or three more new towns. This is firm Labour Party policy: we shall increase the number of new towns.

Mr. John Brewis: Would not the hon. Gentleman create a new city? That would draw people very much more than a moderate-sized town.

Mr. Hamilton: We could argue about the details. I would accept the principle. In a debate before the Summer Recess I urged that a completely new administrative city for Britain should be set up comparable with Canberra. This is a much too progressive concept for the Tory Party, but it may come one day fifty years from now.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North referred to the scant administrative changes that are to take place in Scotland. He quoted words which I already had in mind about the Scottish Development Group, that it is to continue in being. I suppose that is progress by Tory standards. There are to be a series of conferences with all the major interests involved. We are not quite sure what form the conferences will take or what influence the nationalised industries and local authorities will have at the conferences. We are told that activities will be co-ordinated. The whole question of machinery is dismissed in one paragraph in the White Paper. It is riddled with vague generalities and imprecision. At the top, for instance, we have the new Minister who opened the debate this afternoon. I am not quite sure how he fits in here. In a recent speech the Chancellor of the Exchequer made it

clear that the Treasury remains the boss. The new Minister seems to be simply a rather big cog in the Board of Trade machinery to co-ordinate steps taken by other Departments, a kind of overlord of the 1952 kind introduced by the right hon. Member for Woodford (Sir W. Churchill) and very quickly abandoned.
I am glad that the Secretary of State for Industry and Trade is back in the Chamber. He is just the man I want to see. He went out of his way this afternoon to say that these programmes would be sustained, no matter what happened to the percentage rate of unemployment. This is a complete reversal of the policy of the Local Employment Act, 1960. To that extent it is an admission of the failure of that policy. I must ask the question which The Times asked in the editorial which has already been commented on. I quote from The Times of 15th November:
The present schemes will have value only if they can be sustained. Can the Government maintain them and still find enough money and resources to do similar redevelopment in the other areas? ….Past neglect is now exacting a very heavy price.
Has any estimate been made not only of the total cost of sustaining development in these areas but of the likely cost of sustaining it after the new policies for the other regions have been produced? This is a very important point. The right hon. Gentleman obviously could not give a guarantee that this policy would be sustained, unless he knew, or had some idea of, the total cost of sustaining all the other programmes for all the other areas, the White Papers for which we have yet to see. I should like a categorical answer to that question.
I was interested in some remarks made by an hon. Member about targets in the White Paper. If there is one criticism that could be made of the White Paper it is that it is singularly lacking precise targets. It is like a marksman saying, "I will fire a thousand bullets, but I will not tell you the target in case I miss it." That is exactly what the Government are doing. Let us take two random examples. First, housing. The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that there is to be an increased programme from 23,000 to 30,000 houses a year. When? Over what period? What is to be the subsidy


structure? What will be the policy towards interest charges to local authorities? There is nothing about ail these things.
Secondly, additional training facilities are mentioned. Additional to what? How much additional training is there to be? There are no precise figures. Lord Blakenham, when Minister of Labour, was in West Fife some months ago and said that he was providing in Dunfermline additional training facilities—76 places producing about 150 trained people a year. That is ludicrously inadequate, and I told Lord Blakenham so at the time. I hope that the Government intend to increase these facilities substantially and over a very short period.
The White Paper contains all sorts of assumptions about migration. For instance, paragraph 39 says
if it is assumed that the level of net emigration will fall to an average of half its present level in the period 1966 to 1971, and to about one-sixth of its present level between 1971 and 1981"—
I am not sure where these assumptions came from. Perhaps they were pulled out of a hat—
then Scotland's population would increase by over 600,000 to almost 6 millions by 1981. This represents an increase in the labour force of some 65.000 by 1971, and of a further 140,000 between 1971 and 1981.
The next assumption following from that is:
If at the same time unemployment were to be reduced from the average level of wholly unemployed in Scotland in 1962 to a level more nearly approaching the national average, a further 35,000 workers might need to be found employment.
From that it is deduced that 100,000 additional jobs would be needed by 1971 and another 140,000 by 1981. There is no indication of how we are to get these jobs. When the right hon. Gentleman was asked at a recent Press conference what would happen if industry did not come, he just did not know. The right hon. Gentleman is asserting all the time that these measures, and these alone, will provide industry. We are not convinced that they will. We consider that he must have alternative proposals ready in case industry does not go to Scotland.
This is where the basic conflict between us arises. We say categorically that, if this does not come from private

enterprise, we shall see that public enterprise provides it. The Government shy away from that because it cuts across their dogma. They believe that we must leave this to private enterprise—that the Government can shovel in public investment on the roads, hospitals, schools and the rest and then private enterprise will cream off the profits.
I do not think that it will work that way. I do not think that this will make any great impact on unemployment in Scotland. We are determined that, if it does not, public enterprise shall do the job. Public enterprise is already doing a great deal. It is clearing up the decay and filth that private enterprise left in my constituency, for instance. The pit heaps, the pit ponds and the squalor that private enterprise left behind are being left to the public to clear up. But if the public do this work, then the profits from the enterprises set up in Scotland should go back to the public. I hope that publicly-owned industry will take care of this problem.
I want to refer to the vagueness and platitudinous character of some of the terms in the White Paper. The language is incredible. Paragraph 53 says:
… there is great scope for office employment in Central Scotland.
What a wonderful revelation! The Government, after twelve years, find that
… there is great scope for office employment in Central Scotland.
It goes on:
… many firms might well find greater advantage in settling in an area with less fierce competition for space and staff.
Glory be! Next we are told
Central Scotland …should as time goes on persuade a larger number of firms to consider it as a location for more of their office administration.
That is all the Government say about additional office accommodation in Scotland—"Firms might go; they should go; if they go it will be a good thing because there is plenty of space and there are plenty of workers". But there is no indication of how it is be done.

Sir F. Maclean: Is the White Paper any vaguer than the assertion of the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) that a Labour Government would tackle the office problem in London.

Mr. Hamilton: This is not our White Paper. These are the Government's proposals for Central Scotland.

Mr. Jay: I pointed out three ways in which we should do the job.

Mr. Hamilton: I do not see why we should answer for the Government's shortcomings. We are debating White Papers published by the Government not Labour Party policy.
I could give an awful lot of other examples of the vagueness of the language in the White Paper on Central Scotland but I do not propose to go any further. I want to say in conclusion that, in so far as these White Papers earn admission by the Government that their previous attempts to solve these problems have been a complete failure, I go along with them. I heartily agree. But, in so far as they show evidence of a very hastily thrown together jumble of proposals designed to convince the electors that "we are all modernisers now", I am not at all convinced either by the sincerity or the ability of the Government to put the proposals into effect and solve the unemployment which has plagued Scotland and the North-East for years.

7.34 p.m.

Sir David Robertson: The hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) is too pessimistic about labour going to Central Scotland. I have a letter from the Glenrothes Development Corporation, which I told him about the other day, in which it justifies keeping rows and rows of new houses empty because they will be needed for incoming industries which the Corporation has been very successful in attracting in recent months. The houses will be needed for key men brought in with those industries.
I also think that the problems of the monsters—London and the South-East and Birmingham, Coventry and the West of England areas—will solve the problems of Scotland the North-East and Lancashire. This region is almost grinding to a halt. We have allowed it to grow and grow unrestricted and, of course, the best of the unemployed people came here because they were certain of getting jobs. Many came from Lancashire, the Highlands and other parts. That was inevitable.
We are now within sight of having 50 million people south of the Cheviots, with only 5½million in Scotland, 230,000 of them in the Highland area. What imbalance of industry and pepole! Scotland has only 8 per cent, of manufacturing industry. England and Wales have 92 per cent. The Government have a heavy responsibility, and earlier Governments even more, for allowing this situation to go on.
Of course every industrialist, particularly the consumer goods manufacturer, wants to be in the market place. The London area is the biggest market, and Birmingham, Coventry and the West Midlands area is the next biggest. Every manufacturer of consumer goods wants to get into a market where there are no transport charges, only delivery charges.
So the monsters grow and grow and nothing has been done to correct the situation. Today there has been talk about more regional committees and a Highland development board has been proposed. But we do not need any more mechanism. We are full of it. This House should control the situation. It rests on us and not on regions to do the job. We should express our situation tonight, as I am trying to do, because that situation is wholly wrong and must be corrected.
The Government showed great wisdom in locating the Dounreay atomic power station in my constituency. With the aid of my right hon. Friend, now Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations and the Colonies, we ultimately got the atomic plant put there on the Pentland Firth. It was a great struggle to get it there. It lasted thirteen months.
All the civil servants, and Sir Christopher Hinton himself, said, "We will never get our top men to live there". I said to them, "I have three dukes and 20 millionaires in my constituency who can afford to go anywhere else to live but who prefer Caithness and Sutherland. Other Highland counties have the same experience".
Of course we got all the men we wanted. The chaps came from Harwell and Chester and elsewhere. They are enjoying life very much better in Caithness and Sutherland than in the places they came from. They are surrounded by beautiful scenery. They


enjoy good living, plenty of open space and time for leisure. Contrast that with the situation in this area.
Under this House tonight West Indian porters are pushing bodies into underground trains in order to get the doors closed. There are queues for buses everywhere when people are going to work or are returning home. Buses come along with two empty places and can take no more. The main line railways are just as bad. Why did we suffer a situation like that to grow?
But this is the controlling situation—50 million people trying to crowd into the southern part of the country. How many more can it take? I can assure the hon. Member for Fife, West that Central Scotland will be overflowing. They will all be anxious to go there, away from this crush. The sooner we get on with the process the better.

7.39 p.m.

Mr. Cyril Bence: I do not agree with the hon. Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Sir D. Robertson) in all he said, but I certainly agree that, historically, it has been a grave mistake to allow this tremendous overcrowding in the South and South-East of England. I also agree with his criticism of regionalism in tackling this situation. One would imagine that we were talking about the government of a huge territory, contending with vast distances where there was need for communication between regional governments and a central Government thousands of miles away. That picture is, of course, nonsense.
This is, after all, a very small country. It is quite undesirable that we should split it up into a series of local machines to solve what is essentially a problem of the distribution of population and its economic and functional activity in various spheres. I am sure that the hon. Member will agree with me that I am interpreting what he was saying when he referred to the regional organisation.
We have had this problem with us now for 12 years and it has been said many times on both sides of the House that the longer we delayed taking action the more difficult the problem would become. The investment in Linwood is £23·5 million. The output is 1.000 motor

cars a week, or 50,000 a year, and the employment roll is approximately 3,000. The longer we delay solving this imbalance in the distribution of population, the more difficult it becomes to solve it by orthodox means. We have already reached the stage when some unorthodox action must be taken to solve this terrible problem.
The Leader of the Liberal Party made another point to which I should like to refer. We have heard of factories being established in Scotland and the North by firms whose headquarters are in the Midlands or the South. Men accept executive positions in these branches, but it is not long before they think of their own advancement in terms of moving back to the centre. I have met this attitude often among young people who have the idea that individual progress means making their way back to the head office or the centre of the industrial complex. I hope that those who have branch factories distributed over the country will try to inculcate into their employees the idea that it might be progress for them if they move out of the centre to the perimeter.
I was anxious to take part in this debate, because some time ago a promise was made to me by a previous President of the Board of Trade in this same Government. Incidentally, I want to make it quite clear that we are debating tonight not in a new Session of Parliament under a new Government, but in a new Session under a Government which has been in office for 12 years. The impression in the country that we have had a new Government since last month is strong. I hope that those who try to put this false idea over will be more honest and will admit that we are debating a 12-year-old problem with a 12-year-old Government.
The previous President of the Board of Trade gave me in good faith a promise about an industrial site in Dalmuir, Clydebank which had been disposed of by Scottish Industrial Estates Ltd, to Ingersoll-Rand with the assumption that it was to be used as a factory. It now lies fallow with its 130 acres undeveloped. I was promised that if the Town Council of Clydebank found a client for this industrial site the President of the Board of Trade would take steps to reacquire it.
I believe that the council has written to the President of the Board of Trade that it now has a customer. I hope, therefore, that the right hon. Gentleman will reacquire the site so that the client now negotiating for it may have it. It is an admirable site situated on the river with good road and rail services. It is intended to be used for the prefabrication of housing units. It is not far from the new town of Cumbernauld and it is easily situated for the transport to it of raw materials from cement works to make the concrete sections.
My complaint is that the Secretary of State for Scotland is not co-operating very well with the President of the Board of Trade. Paragraph 91, on page 24 of the White Paper on Central Scotland, says that
School building plans must match the needs of a growing and a more mobile population.
In my constituency there is the new town of Cumbernauld with a growing population. The new town is an excellent concept and tremendous credit is due to those who conceived it and those who are managing it. They are doing a wonderful job. Professor Buchanan may well have made a detailed study of the design of the centre of the new town before he published his Report.
There is also in my constituency the Burgh of Kirkintilloch which has made an overspill agreement with the City of Glasgow under which Glasgow takes over houses at £10 per year per house for 10 years. We therefore have people coming into Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, but for some reason best known to himself the Secretary of State for Scotland has decided to cut the school building programme for Dunbartonshire from £2 million to £800,000 last year. Yet the White Paper says that we shall have a tremendous expansion in the school building programme to keep up with the movement of the population.
I hope that the President of the Board of Trade will press upon the Secretary of State for Scotland to reverse his decision and expand the education programme, particularly for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, and, indeed, for Clydebank where we hope that the new site which I mentioned will be cleared and a new factory will be built, at which perhaps 1,000 young people from the burgh may be employed.
It amazes me that the White Paper, published after the Beeching Report, could say that
Full consideration has been given … to the effect of the proposals in Dr. Beeching's report.
We are to build new factories and more schools. Twelve more factories are to be built in Cumbernauld, according to an Answer given to me a week ago, but Dr. Beeching intends to close the railway. Not only is the passenger service from Cumbernauld to Glasgow to be cut, but also the service from North Lanarkshire to Glasgow. If the two passenger services are cut and are replaced by road services, those services will converge on one road into Glasgow. How in the name of fortune they will cater for all the traffic between eight and nine o'clock in the morning, the traffic from the two areas in which, by Government policy, the population will be increased in the new towns, passes my comprehension. So the Beeching proposal—

Mr. Speir: It may never happen.

Mr. Bence: The hon. Gentleman is forestalling my peroration.
The White Paper refers also to projects for water supply. We are to have great regional water schemes. It does not say who is to pay for them. We are short of water in the Burgh of Clydebank. I hive been pressing for 12 months for a grant from the Treasury so that the water supply may be enlarged there, but I cannot get it. I am told that Section 7 of the Local Employment Act does not apply because this water scheme is not being undertaken to satisfy the needs of existing industries in order that they may expand and employ more labour.
That is the kind of excuse which is given, but this is anew scheme to expand the water supply to the Burgh of Clydebank. We want to do the job because we hope that, as a result of the promise by the President of the Board of Trade that the Department will reacquire the site if we can find a customer, another 1,000 people will be employed. We can then go ahead with the water job as well, but we must be sure that we can do all this. We are frustrated by the various Departments of State, which seem not only to fail to co-operate with us, but to fail to co-operate with each other as well.
When I first looked at the White Paper and I referred also to the other White Paper recently published, Public Investment in Great Britain, October, 1963, I was reminded of the time when the Egyptians tried to force the Israelites to make bricks without straw. We are told about the Erskine bridge, but this is a project for 1970, seven years' hence. When the White Paper was reviewed in some sections of the national Press and the Erskine bridge was mentioned, people in my constituency thought that work on it would start almost next week.
In fact, if one takes these White Papers and the long-distance and middle-distance estimates of projects to commence, and, at the same time, one takes the increase in investment estimated, dividing by the number of years over which they are set, it is apparent that what the Government will be spending in Scotland in 1963–64 and 1964–65 will be quite insignificant as an increase over spending in 1962–63.
Therefore, putting the two together, I came to the conclusion that these two documents constitute almost a dishonest presentation of the Government's proposals. It is all very well to say that £10,000 will be spent, but it is misrepresentation not to make clear that it is to be spent over 10 years and amounts to no more than £1,000 a year. We have been told by the Prime Minister about a tremendous £400 million programme, but that is to come over about 12 years. It will not come within the lifetime of one Parliament. The Erskine bridge is nearly two Parliaments away. To my mind, it is quite dishonest, and I remain completely unconvinced.
The hon. Member for Hexham (Mr. Speir) said that it may never happen. I am certain that we are in a position exactly similar to the one we were in in 1958. An election is in the offing. As for public investment, the Government take a series of figures, multiply by two, and then splash all sorts of promises about in their election manifestoes. The Prime Minister has said that our economy is just at the point when we can go on to prosperity. We have "turned the corner". I heard that from Stanley Baldwin in 1930.

Mr. Sydney Silverman: We heard it in 1920, too.

Mr. Bence: Yes, we heard it in the twenties. Now, for some extraordinary reason, we have suddenly reached a point in our economic development when inflation is behind us, when our balance of payments problems are behind us, and when we can go ahead at a steady rate of advance towards prosperity. All is set fair.
I do not believe it. We are an island of 50 million people in a highly competitive world. I believe implicitly that a politician ought not to tell the people that Britain's economy is steady and secure at any time. In this difficult and competitive world we have to earn our living. It is quite wrong for politicians to go about the country saying, "We have arrived". Anyone who has spent years in industry or in business knows that the price of solvency is not sitting back and saying, "We have arrived" but is eternal vigilance, attending to the job and keeping ahead of the other chap.
If we want a higher standard of living, we cannot just sit back, put our heads in a bucket and say, with the Prime Minister, "We have arrived". We have not. I believe that Britain must put in a more concentrated effort, a more developed technological and scientific effort, if we are to earn our living in the world and maintain, let alone improve, our standards. People should not be fooled with that sort of stuff and the idea that everything is all right.
I believe that we can do these things not because we have "arrived", but because we have the latent skills and the latent organising ability to do them. But we have been "had" before. We were "had" in 1955 and in 1959. The same sort of glowing pictures were painted then. We were told that we had arrived. As soon as the Tories were returned, of course, we had arrived all right, but we discovered that we were in the muck again and we had to retreat. I believe, and I am certain that millions of my fellow countrymen believe, that this is the same "gag" all over again.

7.58 p.m.

Sir John MacLeod: I shall not follow the hon. Member for Dunbartonshire, East (Mr. Bence), though I agree with him that we must modernise if we are to compete in the modern world. I heartily


agree also that ours is only a small island, and it is in that context that I shall make my remarks. I represent an area which is not remote at all today, and this fact also must be borne in mind. I have always maintained that we must have a greater distribution of industry in these islands.
There is much that one could say about the White Paper, and, no doubt, whatever anyone may say, it will prove to be a programme of development and growth for the areas concerned. But we must develop out of the industrial belt and have greater distribution. I want the Minister to do all he can to stimulate a more balanced economy within Scotland and particularly within the Highland area itself, because in the Highlands there is a vast area which is today totally undeveloped. I believe that more detailed consideration is at present being given to this problem by the Development Department in the Scottish Office, with the co-operation of the development offices which have been set up in the Highland region, but I should like the Secretary of State to tell us how many real economic advisers he has in the Development Department.
It must be right to examine the potential possibilities of establishing a growth area in the Highlands, and it is this which I recommend tonight. It was said in the Gracious Speech that special attention would be given to the development of the Highlands and Islands, so we must get on with the job. In 1950, in a Command Paper on a Programme of Highland Development, it was said:
Fundamentally the Highland programme is to encourage people to live in the Highlands by making it possible to secure there, in return for reasonable efforts, proper standards of life and the means of paying for them".
What wonderful sentiments. I repeat again that we must have a policy for more balanced economic development throughout the country.
The Highland problem is quite different from the problem of the industrial belt. There is a surplus of labour now in the industrial belt. This is where the right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) is wrong in stressing that we should put everything into the areas where there is heavy unemployment. We want to see in Scotland a drawing away from emphasis on the industrial belt, a drawing of people back into the High-

land areas whence many of them came and made conditions in the industrial belt so much more difficult. The state of affairs at present is quite unbalanced.
It is interesting to note that the Government today contribute directly, perhaps, about half of the total regional income in the Highland area, yet the rate of depopulation in the Highlands has doubled since 1951. Admittedly, this is mostly from the rural areas, and the burghs are holding their own to a great extent. Here I draw the attention of the Government, as I have been trying to do for many years, to the Cairncross Report on Local Development in Scotland. I took this copy from the Library today, and I see that it is marked, "Not to be removed from the House of Commons". The trouble is that this appears to be the attitude also in St. Andrew's House. I do not think that it has been removed for a number of years, and I hope that the Scottish Office will noon take another look at it.
I shall quote one or two passages from the Cairncross Report. The Under-Secretary of State who is on the Front Bench will not, of course, have the Report, but I will read, first, from page 40:
We have envisaged the problem of local development in national rather than in local terms and have assumed that the development of country towns and districts should be subject to the same general principles as development elsewhere. We recognise that efforts to influence or control industrial development must pay regard to a number of limiting circumstances.
After dealing with these limiting circumstances, the Cairncross Committee goes on to say that, subject to those limits,
policy should be guided by three objectives which, in order of importance, are "—
I shall read them out, because this is where, I hope, we shall see development taking place in those burghs where already there is existing machinery to cope with development. The three objectives are:
(i) to accelerate the growth of new industrial communities in promising locations; industrial growth should come first, ahead even of the need to reduce unemployment in other areas".
That is in conflict with the argument of the right hon. Member for Battersea, North, that we must deal first and primarily with the unemployment areas.


I believe that we should do it in both spheres. The second objective is:
To make fuller and more economical use of manpower and natural resources that are in danger of being wasted.
That is happening in the Highlands. Emigration means waste of manpower. The third objective is:
To arrest the decline of communities, and the consequent waste of material and social assets which they possess, in cases where a little help might restore them to a thriving condition.
We have to arrest that decline if the rural areas of this vast area are not to be completely depopulated.
One area in which growth could be stimulated is that between Invergordon and Inverness. It is central, and it is a potential growth area for the whole of the North of Scotland. It is necessary not only to develop this potentially viable area but to establish holding areas that have experienced such heavy unemployment. To do this we have to modernise all communications so that labour can move about rapidly but, to a great extent, in its own environment.
In this connection I must return again to the closure of the railways. Paragraph 21 of the White Paper states that this will
… in consultation with the Secretary of State for Scotland, take account of the consequences of the proposal for the present and prospective economy of the area involved.
Yet it has just been proposed that the passenger service should be withdrawn from the whole of the area north of Inverness.
The only appeal is to the Transport Users' Consultative Council. That Council can judge the hardship only, so that the economic consequences will presumably not be considered at all by it. I want the Secretary of State to announce tonight that there is no intention at all of withdrawing that service. Everyone knows that if we are to have viable development, the service cannot be closed because there is no adequate alternative in the foreseeable future. I hope that the Government will stop all this nonsense of waiting until the Consultative Council has judged the hardship. The Minister of Transport can surely get the opinion of the Secretary of State even before using that machinery.
These closures are contrary to the Government's express policy on Highland

development, and we must also take into account the consequential effects on employment where the population is sparse and alternative employment is hard, if not impossible to find. In Kyle of Lochalsh, in my own constituency, there is little or no alternative work for the railwaymen.
In the Invergordon area there is one of the finest ports and harbours in the whole of the country, and it is tragic that, since the Royal Navy ceased using it, it should be used only as an oiling station for the N.A.T.O. fleet when on exercise. This port should be properly developed. There is a railway service which an industry that has developed in the last two years uses extensively and increasingly. It would be disastrous to close that line. The area has air communications, and one of the finest climates in the country. It must be wise to develop the area rather than increase the difficulties in the over-populated industrial belt.
We would all like to see the establishment of industries that use the area's natural resources—agriculture, meat-processing, fish-processing, potato-processing; it is one of the best areas for potatoes—but it is not necessary to use only the natural resources. A small industry has been established in Dingwall, which is in this area, making components for the motor industry in the South of Scotland, and for other industries, too. Electricity and water are available, and this industry has the enterprise and the know-how. That shows that it can be done. It is not absolutely necessary to base development on natural resources.
I must also mention the lack of Government sanction for our Hydro-Electric Board to get on with their programme. I understand that two schemes in my constituency have been proved to meet the McKenzie method of judging production costs between hydro power and that produced by the conventional thermal schemes. I therefore cannot see why there should be any delay in approving them. Inquiries may be necessary, but I hope that they will be speedily completed so that we can get on with the work. This would mean a great deal to employment in the Highland area. Our hydro-scheme produces power that is in ever-increasing demand, and I hope to see industries set up that will use more electricity.
If the White Paper's plan for Central Scotland is not to drain still further the population from the Highlands, which has contributed so much to the difficulties in the past, some counter-attraction must be established in conjunction with the White Paper proposals. A large community in that area would also help to support larger-scale social amenities of all kinds. In the Scottish Grand Committee this morning we discussed the tourist industry in Scotland; that would help to develop the social amenities necessary for industry, too.
We must get it into the minds of industrialists that, with modern communications, the Highlands are no longer remote. People think of the Highlands as being almost in some other world but forget the tremendous development in Canada, where distances of thousands of miles are involved. We are talking of a journey of 400 or 500 miles. One can go to the North of Scotland in the morning as I do on occasion, do a day's work, and return in the evening. That means that executives could enjoy the bright lights of London, if they wished, yet supply first-class management in this area and keep practical day-to-day control of business there. At the same time we do not want too many branch industries because, if anything goes wrong with the economy, the first thing an industrialist does is to close down the branch and return to head office. In addition, we could contribute to the decentralisation of office work.
The amenity of the area must be considered, and we have it. The comparatively lower rents must be considered—we have them, too. Many things could be done, such as a detailed survey of land use, but we have a tremendous number of surveys going on. We have all these reports; I think that we have enough information to enable us to get on with the job, and we also have the machinery. We are dealing with virtually virgin undeveloped country, which should spark the imagination of all the chaps who want to produce new plans from virgin areas.
The Government's Highland policy has fallen short of the objective of economic growth, and unless the problem is to become completely intractable it will have to be dealt with now. The longer it is

put off, the more serious and difficult it will be to tackle. To a certain extent, the present policy has proved ineffective. Today, there are twenty different Government agencies endowed with special concern for the social and economic growth of the region. There are far too many bodies looking after the interests of the Highlands, yet few of them have more than a narrowly defined executive authority, and to a great extent they are proving inefficient. There is a gap to be filled between this and the town and country planning conception in the White Paper.
The Government have done a certain amount through their fiscal policy. The hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) has accused me of criticising the Government and then patting them on the back. We have to pat them on the back because, in the Highland area, the Local Employment Act has to a great extent been effective. It has assisted in the establishment of industry in Invergordon and in Dingwall, and it indirectly assisted the Fort William project—

Mr. Ross: Perhaps the hon. Member will allow me to remind him of the occasion in July when he asked his right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade how many projects there had been, and how many new jobs had flowed from those projects, under the Local Employment Act from October, 1959, to July, 1963. The reply was 350 jobs. That is the amount of success of that Act in the Highlands—90 jobs a year.

Sir J. MacLeod: That is all very well, but 300 jobs in the Highlands is a tremendous number. It is not enough, I agree, but 20 jobs in Dingwall are very welcome. The trouble is that in many Highland towns there is not a great unemployment problem because the people have drifted away. The drift of population is the problem. These figures, which may appear low, are very useful, but they do not go far enough. I hope that the contribution which the Government have made to the Highland Fund will help tremendously. But we are dealing with a rural economy. It is being found that these small enterprises wanting help in the area are not keeping proper accounts. There is a great shortage of accountants. If any people in Glasgow want to establish themselves in the Highlands, there is a great shortage of


accountants to deal with these matters in the rural areas. That is why the Highland Fund is finding it difficult to get on with the job. I hope that Members who represent Glasgow constituencies will urge accountants to go to the area and give their assistance.
Another vehicle which could be of great immediate use is the Scottish Country Industries Development Trust. I am glad that this body is at present reviewing its functions and extending its sphere of activity and looking into the question of business management and industrial efficiency. These are matters which cause difficulty in the rural areas. It is very important in areas which are run down that even the smallest two-or three-men businesses should try to bring about business efficiency. It is difficult for any Government body to give financial help to a company which does not have proper accounts to show. These are practical points which must be dealt with by the Government now because the smallest industry must be encouraged if there are people in the area willing to get on with the job.
Unfortunately, this body is called the Scottish Country Industries Development Trust. I think that that is apt to give a wrong impression, because this body is helping to develop any industry which manufactures or provides a service in the small towns and country areas of Scotland. I hope that every encouragement will be given to this body to expand its activities because it can do, and is doing, a good job in the rural areas.
The time is coming when there will have to be more effective co-ordination of all the disjointed efforts being made in the Highlands area. The Development Department, although it was rather ridiculed by the right hon. Member for Battersea, North, has not been established for very long—for about eighteen months, or something like that. I hope that that body will be able to coordinate more and pull together the organisations looking after the Highlands' interests. The development officers in the Highlands who are working in conjunction with the Development Department are very sincere and are doing a good job, but they need much more encouragement if we are to have

the development that we want in the Highlands.

8.25 p.m.

Mr. William Ainsley (Durham, North-West): I do not want to follow what the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty (Sir J. MacLeod) said about the problems affecting Scotland, though he has my sympathy. The Government have moved the boundary between England and Scotland and placed it somewhere in the Midlands of England. We in the North-East, therefore, have sympathy with the people of Scotland, for we face exactly the same sort of problems.
As the Secretary of State for Industry and Trade opened the debate it passed through my mind that his speech was a sort of deathbed repentance. It certainly undermined all the legislation which has been passed over the last 12 years and was a condemnation of the Government's previous policy.
Four recent Reports will have serious repercussions in the West of Durham and the North-East of England. This is where there is no co-ordination between Government Departments. The first Report is the Beeching Report. Quite recently, I attended two transport users' consultative committee meetings affecting my constituency and the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) and constituencies in other parts of Durham. Thirteen railway stations are due to close and the passenger service in the west of Durham is to be brought to an end.
The Minister of Transport has just issued his report on roads. It may be that on his bicycle he has got no further than Durham. We are, therefore, left with the development of the roads in the east of the county. It is proposed that the development should take place to the east of the Great North Road which runs through the County of Durham.
Finally, we have just had the Local Government Commission's Report and now we have the Report on regional development in the North-East. Paragraph 39 refers to the growth areas. It is the other areas to which I want to refer.
My constituency of North-West Durham has a population of 50,760. That is leaving out one of the local authority


areas, the Brandon urban district. The tact that that area has 20,000 inhabitants conveys to me that it is to come into the growth areas. How farcical it is. The Crook area has been scheduled from the beginning under the Local Employment Act. This area comes within the Bishop Auckland group of areas and the national figures do not reveal the true picture for West Durham. The last figures which I had for the Crook area were 9.2 per cent, unemployment. Yet this programme will neglect the growth of the whole of that area. The programme can be judged only in the light of our national economic development. With only a 2 per cent, annual increase in output, industry has had no urge to expand over the past years and any extensions which have escaped through the loopholes of the Local Employment Acts have been of factories in areas already congested.
I have appreciated the problems of my constituency since I was first elected to this House, in 1955. This is an area in which 1 was born and in which I have lived since. I know the people, their anxieties and their worries. The area's whole economy was based on the coal industry and its by-products and its washeries. No industry came to the area to compete with mining for the available manpower. I remember serving as a boy in the First World War and then marching to take up the watch on the Rhine. Immediately we got to Cologne, we received orders that the miners were to return home, for they were wanted in the interests of the national economy. In peace as in war, the miners have served the nation, but now they are to be cast on one side. That is my objection to the Government's policies.
I was recently talking to Dr. Reid, chairman of the Durham Division of the National Coal Board. I told him that we were suffering from the success of our own policies. We have been transferring men from the closed uneconomic collieries of the West to the East, but only the active people, only the younger face workers. The West has thus been left with the problems of the elderly and of the young just leaving school so that the community was not in balance. The new programme will accentuate that imbalance.
Need I remind the Government that the Durham Division of the Coal Board and the miners are now discussing the redundancy of about 4,500 miners this year? We shall have to run fast with this programme if we are just to keep standing still with the unemployment problem. Towns and villages are decaying in the west of Durham because there is no industry in the area.
How has this state of affairs come about? It did not happen yesterday, or the day before. The Government's industrial policy has been to saturate the home market and that has resulted in over-production and in the loss of many export markets. The world does not owe us a living. We have to earn it, but it has been easier for the industrialists to flood the home market than to seek exports. I am not unmindful of the Government's negotiations to enter the Common Market. Industrialists followed the pattern and concentrated in the South-East, which was a magnet to young people from Scotland and the North-East.
I have had experience of local government and I could give illustration after illustration to prove the point. I remember when Dame Florence Horsbrugh was the Minister of Education and I was one of a deputation who went to see her. I told her that she could say "No" better than Molotov could. It was she who carried through the Government's policy of restriction. Hon. Members will recall that it was in her time that the Government imposed a ban on school building. We have never caught up.
As chairman of my county council, I at once came to London and asked the then Opposition Chief Whip, the late William Whiteley, whether I could get in touch with the chairman of the London County Council. I arranged an unofficial meeting with the then chairman of the London County Council, Mr. Victor Mishcon. I told him that his problem was ours in reverse. London was being saturated with industry while we were being denuded of our basic industries and our young people were being attracted to the London area.
That has been allowed to go on in order to enrich the coffers of the land grabbers, the property racketeers and the take-over bidders. It has been done


at the expense of providing work and employment in the rest of the country. That has been Government policy as was revealed by the Rent Act. The Government are now introducing Measures which they hope to push through during this election year. I ask whether they really mean the policy which they are advocating, because, if they do, it is a condemnation of the Local Employment Act 1960. The only way in which our problems could be dealt with was by the provisions in the Distribution of Industry Act, which was superseded by the Local Employment Acts.
I recall sitting on an Estimates Committee which probed the cost of the repairs at 10 Downing Street and with State House. State House had been empty for a long time. Although there were offers by four industrialists who were anxious to use the building, the owner refused them because he was waiting for the Government to take it over. The Government brought in staffs of various Departments to justify taking over the whole of the building. They even took over a shop which was attached to the building and had been empty for a year.
We in Durham were promised by the present Home Secretary that the Land Registry would be moved to Durham and also another Government Department, but we were told that we must keep quiet about it. My hon. Friend the Member for Durham (Mr. Grey) has been cam-paining for years for Government Departments to be moved to the city, but all we have is the Post Office Savings Department. If the Government mean business they should start by moving their own Departments to the areas where the problems exist.
Many civil servants are sick of the inconveniences of living in London, where there is an ever-increasing problem of housing and congestion and traffic. They are anxious to live with their own families. The nation has gained its strength from the community spirit which is reflected in our village life, but in our towns people do not know their next-door neighbour. There is no sense of home life. This sort of situation helps to promote juvenile delinquency and leads to the break-up of homes.
We in West Durham feel that we have been written off by the Government. When

Lord Hailsham, now Mr. Quintin Hogg, was charged with investigating conditions in the North-East I wrote to remind him that there was a military camp standing empty at Branchpeth, and within a radius of a few miles there were places like Willington, Bishop Auckland, Crook and Durham. At one time nearly 4,000 soldiers were stationed there, but now many of the brick buildings are empty.
What did we do? The Minister of Labour said that there was a possibility of starting a class, and in July of last year, just before the Summer Recess, I was told that 24 boys and 60 adults would be trained there. During the Recess, however, there was a complete somersault by the Government. When we debated the Government's training scheme, I asked the Minister of Labour how many people were to be trained in the North-East, and I informed him that if he did not know the answer I would provide him with the information. The fact is that 20 people are to be trained at Tursdale Mining Training Centre because the mines in West Durham are being closed.
The Durham Division of the Coal Board is planning a new training centre at Seaham Harbour. Being on the edge of the coalfield, the centre is, naturally, of some importance. In a Written Answer last week I was told that
A variety of training courses for young people is available at technical colleges in Bishop Auckland, Consett and Durham. Further first-year apprenticeship courses in engineering for boys will be available early next year at Tursdale Government Training Centre."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 18th November, 1963; Vol. 684, c. 25.]
That is what the Government propose to do to deal with the problem in West Durham.
When will the Government face the reality of the situation and realise that there are thousands of young people in the west of Durham who are unemployed? This is not just propaganda for election purposes. We are dealing with human beings. This is a problem with which I have to live. Young people are leaving school and are not able to find work.
The Government are thinking of making the whole of West Durham a travel-to-work area. It is impossible to do this, for the simple reason that there are no adequate roads. The only road


that we have is the Roman road, the A.68. The others are merely turnpike roads which have been strengthened. There are 24,000 people in Crook and Willington, 15,000 in Tow Law, and these people, together with those in Weardale, will not be able to get to work at Aycliffe, unless, of course, the Government want them to work on the night shift, in which case they will have to travel during the day, and getting some sleep will present problems. I invite any hon. Member who is desirous of doing so to visit this area and see the problems there for himself. What will happen if Dr. Beeching closes the lifelines in this area?
When we probed into the operation of the Local Employment Act, we had a report from the chairman of the estates committee. He spoke of the development in the Team Valley and Aycliffe Trading Estates, and we should very much like to see Lord Hailsham's Report. It is proposed to develop where there are already opportunities for providing diverse industries, but nothing is proposed for us in the West to replace the industries that we have lost.
I notice that in the development of our Colonies it has always been the policy to develop the natural resources of the country by building roads, by providing transport, and by using the soil for productive purposes, but here we are doing just the opposite. We shall denude West Durham and cause further congestion in the east of the County of Durham. We shall leave the western districts to the old people, as residential areas, in which to die their natural death. We have to deal with this problem in a realistic way. Only by treating the North-East as a unit and planning for the whole of the economic development there can we bring about some semblance of success. I can assure the Government that, so far as the West is concerned, under their plan there will be no solution.
We can develop at Crook and thus cater for the people in Tow Law and Weardale and the surrounding area, and Brandon Urban District Council will deal with the overspill of Durham City. We can cater for the people of Langley Park and the villages around there. These will be all good, sound economic units. Unless we are prepared to plan our natural resources, I see no hope

for the success of this scheme. Therefore, it certainly will be with pleasure that I shall vote against the scheme proposed by the Government.

8.52 p.m.

Mr. Stanley R. McMaster: I hope that the hon. Member for Durham, North-West (Mr. Ainsley) will forgive me if I do not follow his remarks, but devote the little time left to me to the interests of Northern Ireland in the context of regional development.
In my constituency, I have a great deal of heavy and light industry which is connected with the shipbuilding industry. This industry, as my right hon. Friend said in opening the debate, has benefited a great deal by the credit facilities—£75 million worth—which were made available to British ship owners to place orders in this country. My only regret is that this sum is not to be enlarged and that, all applications having now been made, the Government have announced that they do not intend to do anything more this year for these traders.
I should like my right hon. Friend to consider the position for a moment. I welcome the presence of the Chief Secretary of the Treasury. I should like him to give sympathetic consideration to approaches that I hope to make to him to extend the shipbuilding credit system, because there is still unemployment in our shipbuilding yards. In Belfast, during the last two or three weeks, we have laid off between 350 and 400 men. These men work in the black trade, that is, the boilermakers, the caulkers and shipwrights, and they cannot find alternative employment in Northern Ireland. This led to an unfortunate strike.
I am glad to say that good sense has prevailed, as it usually does in our shipyards of Harland and Wolff, and that the men were all back at work at the beginning of this week. In an interview that I had with the men this week-end, I was particularly grateful to see how far they were prepared to go to ensure that Harland and Wolff did not lose any orders as a result of uneconomic working.
I believe that flexibility of labour, about which my hon. Friend the Minister is deeply concerned, is definitely assured


in our yards. But the fact remains that men are being paid off. The shortage of employment before Christmas, with no prospect of another job, is a terrifying one, as every hon. Member will realise. Despite the fact that more work is coming in the new year, more could be done by the Government to help our shipyards, which cannot proceed with some work though slipways are empty, because of the strict timetable in the stages of building, resulting from the narrow margin in the shipbuilding industry today. Shipyard work cannot go on, and men are still being laid off, because of the shortage of credit stage by stage.
The Government could also help Northern Ireland in defence. It was recently stated that Polaris submarines were to be placed in yards which had previous experience of building them. This principle could be extended to Harland and Wolff when a new order for an aircraft carrier is placed, because only one aircraft carrier serving in our fleet today has been built at a place other than Belfast. Harland and Wolff probably has more experience of building aircraft carriers than any other shipyard, not only in this country but in the whole world.
In spite of the principle previously laid down for a competitive tender—which principle was set aside in the case of the Polaris submarines—and also the unemployment in Harland and Wolff, there is a good case for placing the aircraft carrier order with Northern Ireland. I am glad to see that the Prime Minister is listening to my remarks. I hope that he will use all his influence with his colleagues in the Cabinet when this subject comes up.
I welcome the attention which has been given to the problems of regional development in general. This will help the whole country, and especially those areas in Scotland and the North-East which received so much attention in the opening speech of the Secretary of State for Industry. I regret to say, however, that Northern Ireland was mentioned only in passing in my right hon. Friend's speech. When attention is given to providing work in Scotland and the North-East it must be realised that to some extent this must be at the expense of Northern Ireland.
The two White Papers, published a few weeks ago, pointed out that the North-East is to receive an increase in public expenditure. That expenditure is to rise from £55 million this year to £80 million next year, and £90 million in the following year. The White Papers point out that 5½ per cent of the population of Great Britain lives in the North-East, and that in the past 5½ per cent, of the total of public expenditure has been spent in the North-East. This expenditure is to rise as a result of the Government's programme, to 6½ per cent, in the coming year and to 7 per cent, in the following year. For Scotland, the sums of money concerned are £100 million, £130 million, and £150 million respectively.
The midland area of Scotland carries only 7½ per cent, of the population of Great Britain, and the percentage of public expenditure which is being spent is to rise from its present 7½ per cent, to 11 per cent, next year and over 11 per cent, the year after. In other words, in the North-East an extra 2½ per cent, or 3 per cent, is being spent in public expenditure above its share calculated purely on a population basis. For Scotland the increase is between 4 per cent, and 5 per cent. But in Northern Ireland, as is shown in the joint report of the working party, although we have 28 per cent, of the working population, the amount spent in public expenditure is only 1 per cent, above the national average. This is static, at 3·8 per cent.
I ask my right hon. Friends on the Treasury Bench to give sympathetic attention to Northern Ireland. My right hon. Friend the Secretary for Industry and Trade, said that the extra help being given to Scotland and the North-East would be at the expense of other areas in the British Isles. The new co-ordinating body which is being set up in the Board of Trade must pay particular attention to the problems of Northern Ireland and expressly cover them.
I was brushed off a little when I sought to interrupt my right hon. Friend's speech. He reminded me of the Government at Stormont, but I remind my right hon. Friends that the United Kingdom is a single unit and that the Treasury here is a key figure. This is why there are 12 Ulster Unionists in the House. The unemployment figure for Northern Ireland, at 6½ per cent., is


2 per cent, worse than that for Scotland or that for the North-East Coast. Northern Ireland should he granted the same kind of help in priming the pump as is being given to Scotland and the North-East.
I should like to see an increase in the building of schools and hospitals and technical training colleges in Northern Ireland, and perhaps a college of advanced technology set up. I want to see an increase in the building of roads, bridges, advance factories and offices—all increased in step with Scotland and the North-East—and impetus given to our slum clearance and rehousing.
May I end with two suggestions? First, I want a better liaison between the Government here, between the Ministers responsible for Education and those other matters of which I have spoken, and their opposite numbers at Stormont, so that any increase in public expenditure will be reflected straight away not only in Scotland and the North-East, but in Northern Ireland. We must get away from the Hall Report, which was printed in the days of credit squeeze and standstill—away from the recommendation that there should be no increase in public expenditure. Finally, I want a better share for Northern Ireland of defence work, both for our shipyards and our aircraft industry, for Short Bros., and Harland, and I want more Government contracts given to Northern Ireland.

9.3 p.m.

Mr. William Ross: May I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig), whose speech was worthy of the occasion, of the constituency and of himself. He was forthright and non-controversial—at least, non-controversial for Dundee. I assure the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Scotland that no one in Dundee would have disagreed with a single word he said. I look forward, as I am sure does the House, to much more controversial efforts from him in future.
My hon. Friend was also logical, which the Government are not, because he pointed out that if the Government intend to carry out their policies for jute and to endanger the mainstay of the city, they should put Dundee into the

special position of being a growth area and of having special consideration. He echoed the feelings of my hon. Friends who have not had an opportunity to speak today. We have another day to come, and I am sure that we shall hear the ringing voice from Greenock and voices from Glasgow and parts of Lanarkshire. As hon. Member for Kilmarnock I should like, too, to make a constituency speech.
The main point is that today the Government's policies have had a tepid welcome, and there will be reactions not only of anger but of outrage all over the areas not covered by the two White Papers when the full implications are realised of the speech made by the President of the Board of Trade.

Mr. W. Hamilton: And Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development.

Mr. Ross: He said that any advances going to these two regions would be at the expense of other regions. This implies within central Scotland that any special advantages—and I presume there are some—of being within a growth point will be at the expense of other areas. Can we wonder, then, at the agitation of my hon. Friends whore present Dundee, Glasgow, Greenock and Kirkcaldy? As my hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy Burghs (Mr. Gourlay) knows, the part of his constituency which has the highest rate of unemployment is outside the growth area.
The Minister said, "We are dealing with the regions and taking these two first because they are the worst. But then we shall deal with the others, and after we have dealt with all of them we shall see whether they fit into the national scene." It is like doing a crossword puzzle without the clues or a jigsaw puzzle without the guidance of the full picture.
All we have here is Alexander's Ragtime Band, and the tune they are playing—they have brought themselves up to date—is "Let us twist it again as we did at the last election". The only thing which is not in the Scottish White Paper is the candidate's photograph.
This is purely and simply a piece of political posturing. The Government


use the word "plan". We talk of congested roads. The most congested political road in Britain today is the road to Damascus. All the repentant Tories have seen the light but they are so blinded by it that they do not know what a plan means yet. However, the word is used more than once in this grandiose fiction of script writers' imagination. They have described it as a comprehensive plan for modernisation of the area and for stimulation of industry.
I ask the President of the Board of Trade whether there is anything new in this at all in relation to industry? Is there a single new decision, a single new inducement? There is nothing. In Scotland, all the new growth areas—so-called—are already within development districts. They could have got all this without the White Paper.
The only thing that is new is a suggestion that there will be increased public expenditure—not this year, and, indeed, not by this Government, but some time in the future, starting next year. My right hon. Friend the Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay), in a brilliant speech, brought the whole thing down to proportion. The figure will be £10 million extra next year.

Mr. Noble: indicated dissent.

Mr. Ross: Yes. Of course, we do not expect the Secretary of State to know. The figures were given by the President of the Board of Trade for this, that and the next thing. This year the figure is £130 million, next year it will be £140 million and thereafter it will retain its proportion. It is a long time since I taught in school but my arithmetic makes that an increase of £10 million. I dare say that even in Argyll they would agree with that.
I want to deal with some aspects of this wonderful plan to demonstrate that it is a piece of political posturing. The White Paper on Central Scotland is sub-titled
A Programme for Development and Growth.
On page 18 there is an item dealing with airports, and it includes this statement about Turnhouse:
… the scale and timing of further development of the airport…will be examined.

Then we come to ports. It says:
The authorities of all the principal ports on the Clyde and Forth have either prepared, or are now preparing, plans… These plans …will be examined …
Then we come to railways. The White Paper says:
The contribution which the railways can make to the promotion of economic growth in Central Scotland is indisputable".
It is indisputable all right. In 1961 the Government decided to plan Livingston. In giving their reasons for selecting Livingston as a new town they said:
The area proposed for designation lies in the valley of the Almond, between Mid Calder and Polboth. The Edinburgh-Glasgow Trunk Road (A.8) forms the northern boundary and the southern tip lies just south of the Edinburgh-Motherwell-Glasgow railway …Livingston should, therefore, be able to benefit at an early date from first class transport facilities to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
That was in 1961—before Beeching. That railway is being closed. But do not worry. Let us turn to the new White Paper again. It says:
Full consideration has been given in drawing up this programme for Central Scotland to the effect of the proposals in Dr. Beeching's report.
In fact, Dr. Beeching has had his way. The Government have accepted it and will fit in their plans with his decisions.
The White Paper talks of an enormous number of projects, some of them started before the last war and some, we are told, will be finished next year. My hon. Friend the Member for Dunbartonshire, East (Mr. Bence) has been told that the A.74, which was to have been finished by 1965, might be finished by 1970. That road was started in about 1938. No definite new projects are mentioned here. Anything that is new has a question mark over it.
It is also hoped that investment resources may permit a start to be made on the construction of a high level bridge at Erskine …
This is a catalogue of deferred hopes, of projects started at various times to meet existing needs. It is a collection of platitudes.
ߪ there is great scope in Central Scotland for office employment …
Someone in Scotland described the part of the White Paper dealing with amenities as "platitudinous piffle". I would not describe it as such. To me, it was not worth a word. The Government have discovered the Edinburgh Festival. Did they plan that too?
One of the few references to Dundee is the reference to the theatre there. Members of our kirk dramatic society are very annoyed because they do not get a mention. We are told platitudinously that these things are all necessary. What are the Government going to do to encourage local authorities to go on with these things? The answer is "absolutely nothing".
This is a piece of posturing. The President of the Board of Trade will remember that he had a few things to say to me about the Local Employment Act. I suggested, and we on this side have suggested, that it was not a success, and so the right hon. Gentleman repeated the kind of stuff that we had from the Prime Minister when he was touring round Kinross. Never was a man so ill-reported. He had a fireside chat with the local correspondents and that night the Dundee Courier came out with the statement that
Mr. Ross had said that the state of Scotland is important in this connection and the Prime Minister replied, 'I will take Mr. Ross on any platform he likes.'
That was in the Press. Mr. Ross was still in Crieff, and Mr. Ross said that he would meet the Prime Minister, and when the reporters asked the Prime Minister he said, "I was misreported".
It is stated that there is a sum of £47 million for Scotland. This is the latest. The figure has risen by £3½ million from the same source since last week, because last week I asked for the figures for each year. It is interesting to note them. They are, for 1960–61, £3·4 million; for 1961–62, £18·4 million—that was when the motor industry was building up—and for 1962–63 the figure is down to £14·4 million. In the current year, when unemployment is higher than it has ever been, the sum is £7 million and we are told by the Estimates Committee that it is expected that it will drop back to the 1960 level of £3 million.
The aim of the White Papers is to try and distract the minds of the people from the Government's failure in carrying out the pledges and promises for Scotland and the North-East and the other areas made in 1959–60. All this stuff is not new. We have had it before. We had it from the last Prime Minister. We had it at the time of the General Election. Here is the then Prime Ministers message to Scotland:

In Scotland the main emphasis will be on the provision of jobs. Scotland's over-dependence on the old-established industries is reflected, even in the most prosperous times, in a relatively higher level of unemployment. We are determined to correct this disparity, and we shall continue our successful work to attract new enterprises…. You will see that for this purpose we are going to bring in a Bill to modernise our distribution of industry policy.
I am sorry that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is not present. He had plenty to say and we had plenty of Amendments to put forward at that time to strengthen the Bill, but they were all turned down. Even the hon. Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Sir F. Maclean) and the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty (Sir John MacLeod) supported the Government at that time. It is interesting to note that the only hon. Member opposite who supported this White Paper today is not present now. He is already on the stool of repentance.
We were asked what we on this side of the House would do. We were asked whether we would direct people. I ask hon. Members to look up HANSARD for the 23rd February, 1960. This is what the present Chancellor of the Exchequer said then:
We cannot get people to go to the areas where we want them to go until we first compel them"—
this is the Chancellor of the Exchequer—
to expand other than in the crowded Midlands and this South".
The crowded Midlands and the South are more crowded than ever they were, and the worst hit areas are still worse hit.
The right hon. Gentleman went on to say:
We intend to tackle this problem on a progressive basis by dealing, first, with the areas which are worst hit and then giving support to places which are less badly hit."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 23rd February, 1960; Vol. 618, c. 216 and 219.]
He said that the success of that Measure would be judged not by money; that it was sheer folly to talk about money in that sense. That is what the President of the Board of Trade said at that time—that it is foolish to measure success in terms of money spent. I hope that that goes home to the Prime Minister. What matters is the number of jobs related to the need, and those two things have never been matched in Scotland, the North-East or even Northern Ireland.

Mr. Speir: Or Wales.

Mr. Ross: Yes, the voice of Wales will be heard.
How can an hon. Member for one of the Highland constituencies be satisfied with the Local Employment Act, which provides 90 jobs a year? What does he imagine will be the effect of the White Paper, which, I presume, he will support tomorrow night? What will be the effect of concentrating effort, if it is concentrated—and this is the Government's pledge—in Central Scotland? What will be the effect on the Highlands or on the Borders? It will be to exaggerate and continue the depopulation of those areas. What we want is a plan for Scotland matched to the true needs of Scotland as a whole.
Listen to this:
In seeking new industry, we must make sure that the advantages we have to offer are as widely known as possible. To my mind, they are space and manpower. By contrast with some other parts of Britain, there is more than enough space available in Scotland to accommodate all the industrial development we could want—and it need not be only in the Forth and Clyde Basins. There are Dundee and Aberdeen and many country areas, including the Highlands, where sites and good labour are waiting for development. We do not want to spread congestion in our central belt and produce our own national coffin through lack of foresight."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 19th July, 1962; Vol. 663, c. 674]
That was said by the Secretary of State for Scotland last year, in the first speech he made, in the debate on Scottish industry and employment.
It is economic nonsense. I think that it was the noble Lord the Minister of State who said that we wanted to make the centre of Scotland as attractive as the Midlands of England. It is not the most attractive part of the world, but, surely, we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. If we are re-planning and modernising Scotland, creating new towns and new growth areas, we must take advantage of our attractions, attractions of space and the availability of manpower elsewhere than in this narrow belt.
In 1952, at the time when we had the Cairncross Report to which the hon. Member for Ross and Cromarty referred, a delegation from this side of the House went to the Secretary of State for Scotland and the President of the Board of Trade at that time and pleaded with

them to give us a blueprint for Scottish industry. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, Leith (Mr. Hoy) will remember that occasion because he was with us. Nothing was done. We drifted on. Even the distribution of industry policy was not properly applied.
Who was the Minister of State for Scotland at that time? He has had promotion since then. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I have been looking at all the speeches he made about Scottish industry in another place while he was in that exalted position. He never made one.
The Prime Minister went round Kinross lining up all the factories, 50 yards wide—what a silly way to line up factories—and some of them were empty, while some had not even been built. If all the men in Scotland who had been made redundant had been lined up, he would have had much less of the feudal loyalty to which he was able to appeal in Kinross and West Perthshire.
What has happened to Scotland is a disgrace. How can the Government say now that they have a plan, when all we have are, in truth, projects, long-deferred promises and platitudes? What was it the previous Prime Minister said in his message to Scotland?—
The best test of the value of promises is performance.
So it is.
The Government are getting so many Reports now, and they are so near an election, that they accept them all without hesitation. What about Robbins? Accepted straight away, never mind what has been done in cutting down education in Scotland. Incidentally, what increase is there to be in education next year, apart from the increase in teachers' salaries? There is no increase whatever shown in the public investment programme. There was the Cameron Report, the only survey made in this country of the transport needs of an area, and it was in the Highlands of Scotland. That was accepted, too. A board has been set up. What has happened about that? Just this week, we have had announcements about the closing of stations and the withdrawal of services.
Who is really who in Scotland? Is it the Secretary of State for Scotland? Is


is the Prime Minister? Or is it Dr. Beeching and the Minister of Transport, who combine the sadism of Burke and Hare with the irresponsibility of Francie and Josie? If the Secretary of State for Scotland fully appreciated the position, and the dangers in which he is putting the social life and future hopes of that part, he would tell the Minister of Transport to tell Dr. Beeching to forget all about this withdrawal of passenger services there. It is absolutely ridiculous to go on with this farce if the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Prime Minister really mean their pledge to the Highlands and to Scotland about the adequacy of alternative transport. It is no good saying that it will never happen; it all depends on their standard of adequacy. After what has happened elsewhere, the Highlands had better be prepared for the worst.
There has been considerable criticism, not only in this debate but in the Press in Scotland about the burden the right hon. Gentleman is placing on the construction industry. It is reckoned that if this work carries on it will require an increase of about 30,000 or 40,000 men in that industry in Scotland. The construction industry has at present about 11,000 men unemployed. If we add the number of men in shipbuilding and coal mining who might be able to change their jobs easily, I gather that it still leaves about 25,000 men who will have to be retrained. We are told in this so-called plan that we are to build up to the ability to retrain 1,700 men a year.
How is that to be done? As has been pointed out more than once, we are trying to expand the industry by one-third in three years when the N.E.D.C. has already pointed out that we shall be straining it to expand by one-fifth in five years over the whole country. The thing does not add up or match up. That is why there is cynicism about the areas covered, and anger and despair in the areas that are lined up.
I want now to draw attention to yet another Report—which, once again, has been accepted in principle by the Government. Some people have said that the Buchanan Report is the most far-reaching Report we have had. The Crowther Steering Group did not have a great deal of faith in the Government's

promises and pledges for sorting out the imbalance in the country, because it said in paragraph 14:
We would not wish to pre-judge the success of the efforts that are now being made to attract industry and population to those parts of the country that have been losing them. But it is doubtful whether they will have such a far-reaching success as wholly to reverse the present tendency for South East England and the Midlands to grow at a faster rate than the rest of the country.
If they are to grow at a still faster rate, my hon. Friend the Member for Mother well (Mr. Lawson) was right when he said that, relatively, the other parts of the country will become poorer, and lag further and further behind. It is happening within Great Britain as a whole, and it will happen by Government decree to an exaggerated extent in Scotland if these plans are carried out.
Paragraph 45 of the Buchanan Report sums it all up. The Toothill Report said the same thing; that Scotland is suffering in an extreme degree from the ills from which the whole of Britain is suffering. It said that one way to cure it was by planning, with proper targets for industry. It said that this had been done elsewhere, but we have not got it in Britain. Where do we go from here? We do not know the targets for industry. We do not know which industries will be expanded, or who will expand them. There is no decision here at all. In fact, no one has been consulted. I ask the Secretary of State: have the Government consulted any local authority about this plan, or are they just intending to start? This is a piece of window-dressing.
The Government should pay attention to paragraph 45 of the Crowther Steering Group's Report, which states:
In any effective programme of urban modernisation, such as we have been outlining, it is possible to distinguish four main stages.
I want to quote only the first one:
First, there must be a clear statement of national objectives. Regional planning cannot work in isolation. Unless there is a policy on a national basis dealing with the location of industry and population, from which would flow policies in respect of roads, ports, air facilities, etc., regional planning cannot be successful. Without such a policy it is impossible to know what populations and kinds of employment must be planned for locally, nor the rate at which development can take place, nor can there be any certainty that some uncontrolled drift of events will not reduce all local plans to futility.


What we are getting is a continuation of drift. Planning is antagonistic to the principles of hon. Members opposite, because it means interfering with the sanctity of free enterprise, and with this strange belief of, "Leave them alone, and everything will come right." Until we do get purpose, ruthless planning, and acceptance by the Government of responsibility for what they pledge to the people about full employment and growth within the whole nation, we will continue to drift.
I sincerely hope that tomorrow night hon. Members from Scotland and from all those areas which have discovered that even though they are development districts they will get no priority from the Government, and that their problems will not be met, and who realise that what we have is piecemeal, ineffective planning, will take their stand against the Government. This is my advice to the twelve Members from Northern Ireland. If they feel that this country needs at this moment more than ever to turn its back on the past and to release and harness the energies of the people, let them use their political power here to achieve it. Until they do, the Government will drift on. I sincerely hope that tomorrow night will be a turning point.

9.36 p.m.

The Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. Michael Noble): It is always a pleasure to welcome a maiden speech in this House. I am particularly delighted to have the explanation from the hon. Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross) that the very forthright speech made by the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Doig) was, for Dundee, non-controversial. We look forward, as the hon. Member for Kilmarnock said, to some really forthright and controversial speeches in future from the hon. Member for Dundee, West.
I welcome the fact that this is a United Kingdom debate, although I am sure that some of my hon. Friends and some hon. Members opposite probably feel that Scotland has hogged a good deal of it. However, I think that those of us who live north of the Border realise very clearly that our problems cannot be solved without looking, at the same time, at the problems in the South of

England. Therefore, a United Kingdom debate, even it it spreads unevenly over two days, is a good thing.
The hon. Member for Kilmarnock said that the Government were playing a tune which he described as "Let's twist again". Having listened carefully to most of his rather long speech, I quite cheerfully face the "Crazy Gang "opposite, because they seem to be just as much out of date as a good many of their ideas. The point that he made to the effect that it was impossible to give advantages to growth areas without, to some extent, penalising other areas is perfectly true. Again and again, during the years I have been in this House, hon. Members opposite have asked the Government to give priority to Scotland. What does "priority" mean unless it means giving more to the places which need it most?
The hon. Member for Kilmarnock also said that the Government's plan was a piece of political posturing. I am very tempted to say that a great deal of the opposition which I have heard from hon. Members opposite today arose, perhaps, because they are afraid that things are going rather better in Scotland than they hoped they might. They are, therefore, hoping that this will not continue and that the "Crazy Gang" will continue to sit on the benches opposite. If the hon. Member is taking the figures of public investment in Scotland at the beginning of this year, investment was running at the rate of £100 million. During the course of this year, for reasons which become increasingly obvious if anybody studies the White Paper, the figure went from £100 million to £130 million and it goes to £140 million next year. Therefore, it is dishonest to say that the whole of this represents only a 10 per cent. rise.
I see the fun, if the hon. Member for Kilmarnock wants to indulge in it, of picking out odd sentences in any White Paper and saying that they are platitudinous. But I find this difficult to understand from the hon. Member, who presumably read, although I dare say he did not write or approve of, "Signposts for the 'Sixties".
The hon. Member asked particularly about the problem of the burden on the construction industries. I admit that this is a difficult problem to assess


accurately. Last spring, I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. George Middle-ton. We were discussing a speech which I had made a short time before, saying that I thought we would need in Scotland 10,000 to 20,000 extra building operatives very quickly. He explained to me the difficulties inherent in building up a trained force unless there was an adequate supply of work in front of it and the difficulties that this could create for the trade unions.
Now that we have attempted to show that there is enough work in front of the trade unions in the building and construction industries in Scotland for the next five or 10 years, and, in addition to that, we hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister of Public Building and Works will be able to stimulate new sorts of building and more efficient uses of material and men, it does not seem out of reason to set our target for the next five or 10 years pretty high.
Coming back to the main subject of the debate, the persistent problems of unemployment and migration and the immensely accelerated rate of industrial change in some sections of the Scottish economy often seem to tempt people to believe that by some magic formula a solution could be found which would cure all our ills, regardless of the fortunes of the national economy as a whole. This fallacy derives from an excessive degree of introspection and concentration on the margins of the problem.
The table in Appendix 2 of the Scottish White Paper shows, for example, that, taking all the industries and services together, and, in particular, the service industries which employ rather more than 50 per cent, of all insured workers in Scotland, Scotland's rate of growth in those industries and services which are expanding is in step with the rate of employment growth in those industries in Great Britain as a whole. The rate of growth in these expanding industries, which employ nearly 1½ million people, or about 70 per cent, of the total Scottish labour force, was, in the three years down to mid-1962, fractionally higher than the Great Britain figure.
The critical problem in Scotland, therefore, has been the accelerated rate

of change in the older industries, and I shall have more to say about this later. What is clear from these figures is that the greater part of the Scottish economy is in good heart and that the rate of growth matches and more than matches the United Kingdom figures.
I now turn to the application to Scotland of the Government policy outlined by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development. For the reasons that I have given, this policy must be cast in the framework of our policy for Great Britain as a whole and within that framework it is my responsibility, as Scotland's Minister, to prepare and progress the implementation of specific plans for the separate economic regions of Scotland. For this purpose we have established a Scottish Development Group in which all the major Departments concerned with the Scottish economy are represented. This Group meets frequently under the chairmanship of the Secretary of the Scottish Development Department and I receive regular reports of the progress of its work. The first phase of the work of this Group is reflected in the proposals now set out in the White Paper on Central Scotland.
Action on these proposals has already been initiated. Discussions with local authorities have been started and in the course of those discussions and further consultations which I shall be having with the New Town Corporations and other bodies we shall work out with them early in the new year fully integrated and detailed arrangements for the implementation of the plan. The timing of the new developments will be closely linked with industrial progress and will be sufficiently flexible to cater for new developments in the economy.
In this work we have learned a great deal from the experience which we have gained from planning and phasing large new developments like the new towns. Our ultimate intention is that the development of both the regional infrastructure and of the growth areas, stretching across Central Scotland from Fife to North Ayrshire, should be programmed and phased with the same degree of care and precision. In this way, all the participants, from the construction industries right through to the


people who will live and work in these areas, will have clearly before them the pattern of future developments.
The success of the new towns is, we are satisfied, due very largely to this kind of pre-planning and programming and to the sense of confident commitment which it inspires. It makes an immense difference to industrialists who are seeking locations for new projects or expansions to have before them a complete picture of the developments in prospect.

Mr. Lawson: The growth area which includes the new town of East Kilbride also includes the older town of Mother well, which I represent. I recently asked the right hon. Gentleman a Question about additional financial assistance, for example, towards the building of houses. The answer I got was that there was no additional financial assistance. There has been no consultation in my constituency although it is part of a growth area. What has the right hon. Gentleman to say about that?

Mr. Noble: Close consultation with local authorities is starting now and will continue regularly. There has been consultation before, of course, but now we have to get down to the details.
The hon. Member for Kilmarnock asked that we should make a plan for the whole of Scotland. Of course we could have done that, but it would have taken a good many months extra to do. [Interruption.] That may be the view of hon. Members opposite, but it will not be shared by any of the people on my staff, who have worked extremely hard in the last 15 months. Central Scotland has, rightly I think, to be our first priority. As hon. Members on both sides of the House know, it comprises 75 per cent, of our population and about 90 per cent, of the whole of our industry.
But it is perfectly clear that we have also to develop complementary measures for the other areas of Scotland, and my Development Group has already started on this work. I should make it perfectly clear that the special examination of these areas does not by any means imply that immediate action within present policies will not be pressed forward with full vigour. To give an

example, I need mention only the pulp mill at Fort William.
One of the main criticisms of the Central Scotland White Paper is that it offers no direct or immediate relief to the problems of this winter. But that is not its purpose. It is concerned with a longer term pattern of modernisation for the whole area. The problems of this winter were very much in mind when the measures of financial policy announced earlier this year were put into effect—the changes in the Finance Act, especially free depreciation in the development districts, the changes in the Local Employment Act, including standard inducements, the shipbuilding credit scheme, the special programmes of additional investment and other decisions in the same field. These are already showing conspicuous results.
For example, unemployment in shipbuilding has fallen from 7,800 in April to about 4,000 at the end of October. Nearly one-third of all the new tonnage which the £75 million credit scheme is helping to finance is being built in Scotland. In manufacturing industry the amount of financial assistance offered under the Local Employment Act for Scottish projects between April and October of this year was equal to the full total of the preceding 12 months. Even this does not reflect the full results of the 496 applications which have come in for projects in Scotland out of a total of about 1,150 for the United Kingdom since the Budget. Most of these have come forward recently and are now being processed.
Hon. Members asked about the rate of failures in applications. Out of 1,150, I am told, nearly 100 have been turned down.

Mr. Thorpe: Presumably the right hon. Gentleman has no figures on a regional basis.

Mr. Noble: I was asked for the United Kingdom figure and I have given it.
Many of the new projects will give very early employment particularly where, as in the new towns and in some other areas, there are already factories waiting, into which people can move and start work at once. The full employment tally of all the projects which have recently been announced in the


Press—no fewer than 16 major industrial developments ranging from printing to spun concrete pipes, and in geographical distribution from Dundee to Dalkeith and Girvan—is estimated at 31,000 extra jobs in the next two years.
I find it particularly encouraging that when the Holyrood Knitwear factory closed, or announced its impending closure, a few weeks ago, there were immediately a number of prospective developers, and the factory has already been taken up by a firm engaged in one of the fastest growing industries in the whole country, electronics and telecommunications equipment. This is a real success story and illustrates better than anything else the buoyancy of one of our best growth areas.
In the few moments left to me I will try to deal with points from the speeches made today. The right hon. Member for Battersea, North (Mr. Jay) asked why the Linwood and Paisley area had not been made a growth area. The reason is simple. In that small area there is no room to expand beyond its obvious existing expansion. The right hon. Gentleman also asked why Newcastle was included in a growth area and Glasgow was not. The reason is also fairly simple. If we look at the pattern of the two maps, it will be seen that Newcastle is in the middle of one large growth area for the North-East Glasgow is not in the middle of a growth area for Scotland and at the moment is the centre of a major overspill operation. We are hoping that many of the people in Glasgow will move out of that city and form the labour force for places like East Kilbride, Cumbernauld and other parts.
I think that I have dealt with the argument of the right hon. Gentleman that if we give a little extra to growth areas other places will get less. But I should like to assure him that because of the extra which in this plan we are giving to the growth areas, in public investment, infrastructure, roads, houses, and so on, we are not in any way cutting down on the balance for the rest of Scotland as a whole—

Mr. Jay: Can the Secretary of State—

Mr. Noble: I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will allow me to continue,

because I have little time and a great deal to say.

Dr. Dickson Mabon: rose

Mr. Noble: I cannot give way. I started late and I am trying to cover a wide-ranging subject very quickly.
In his speech the right hon. Gentleman made clear that he did not accept the concept of growth areas, because he wanted all areas where there was a high and persistent rate of unemployment to be treated alike. I understand that in this he differs from the hon. Member for Fife, West (Mr. W. Hamilton) and, indeed, there is room for a divergence of opinion. We believe that growth areas are right and we intend to pursue that policy.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, East (Mr. Wolrige-Gordon) give a lurid description of people in the snow who were warm round the middle, but had cold hands and feet. I know that my hon. Friend wears the kilt and he will know that if one has a kilt and keeps one's middle warm, ones hands and feet do not get cold. I agree with my hon. Friend that migration inevitably follows a certain amount of unemployment, and this we hope and plan to try to diminish greatly over the next few years. I welcome the fact that he was pleased that there has been real progress and healthy development in Buchan. He has spoken to me before about the importance of freight services to that area.
I wish to mention one point raised in the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Dundee, West. I entirely agree that we must avoid creating another Birmingham in the central belt and we have no intention of doing that. My hon. Friend the Member for Bute and North Ayrshire (Sir F. Maclean) paid a tribute to the Toothill Committee and its work. I notice that if the Government do not accept anything recommended by Mr. Toothill, the Opposition ask why, but if we do, they say they do not agree with it in any case.

Dr. Dickson Mabon: That is not true.

Mr. Noble: None the less, I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend was prepared to be generous in a constituency sense and to welcome the growth which will take place around Irvine because he


knows that it will benefit his constituency as well as that of the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Manuel).
The right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Grimond) suggested that we should co-ordinate all these reports that come in from Dr. Beeching, Professor Buchanan, and so on, and this is exactly what the Scottish Development Department is planning to do.
The right hon. Gentleman also suggested that the Toothill recommendation, which was supported by N.E.D.C., of a 4 per cent, rate of growth in the United Kingdom might be satisfactory, but asked what was our calculation of the growth in Scotland and the North-East. I cannot give him an exact figure, because it is impossible to break down the United Kingdom figure, but it is quite clear that if we are to overtake the United Kingdom average we in Scotland and the North-East have to grow rather faster than 4 per cent.
I disagree profoundly with a remark made by the right hon. Gentleman, but he was not expressing his own thoughts. He said that two engineering firms had told him that they could not get suitable staff in Scotland. I have spoken to many engineering firms in America as well as in Scotland. They have all unanimously said how easy it is both to get and to train engineering staff in Scotland, and I think that this point should be set right.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Angus and Mearns (Sir C. Thornton-Kemsley) made most of his speech, as I expected he would, on the technical problems of planning, on which he is a considerable expert and very knowledgeable. We have every intention of keeping the local authorities very closely in our minds in the whole of this planning, because we realise how important their co-operation and their work is to the whole of the future.
On his problem of the green belt, I think that the whole concept of growth areas as set out in our map shows that we are keen to avoid the sort of urban sprawl which has occurred in the South.
The hon. Member for Fife, West assured us that the Government could not last for more than six months. He

may be wrong. The intention of the plan is that we should be here for at least another five years to see it carried out. I am glad the hon. Gentleman agreed that growth areas were acceptable, because I think that they are particularly suitable for his constituency.
I welcome, also, the fact that the hon. Gentleman wants more new towns. It is true, as he said, that we need 100,000 more jobs by 1971, and 140,000 more between then and 1981, but we believe that by these methods we shall get them, and that it will not be necessary to bring in public enterprise, which is a polite form of nationalisation, to fill the gap.
I am sorry that I missed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness and Sutherland (Sir D. Robertson). He confirmed what I am sure the hon. Member for Fife, West knows, that Glenrothes is busy keeping a lot of houses empty because it knows that a great deal of industry is coming to that area. I am glad that he stressed the tremendous success that Dounreay has been in an extremely distant and isolated part of the country. It disposes once and for all of the sort of argument that one often hears used, sometimes from this side of the House, and sometimes from hon. Gentlemen opposite, that it is impossible to settle intelligent, educated and high-grade staff, to which the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland referred, in the Highlands. It can be done, and has been done very successfully.
I also missed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Ross and Cromarty (Sir John Macleod). I am looking forward to reading his speech in HANSARD tomorrow. I had a chance of talking to my hon. Friend before he made his speech, and he told me roughly what line he was going to take.
I do not agree with the hon. Member for Kilmarnock that this has been a tepid or dull debate. I think that it has been an interesting one.

Mr. Ross: I did not say that.

Mr. Noble: I beg the hon. Gentleman's pardon. He said that the White Paper would produce a tepid result. I believe that most Members realise that


this is the first attempt really to get things in Scotland put right.

It being Ten o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.

Debate to be resumed Tomorrow.

SUCCESSION (SCOTLAND) BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

Motion made, and Question put (pursuant to Standing Order No. 62 (Public Bills relating exclusively to Scotland)), That the Bill be committed to the Scottish Standing Committee.—[Mr. Noble.]

Question agreed to.

Bill (deemed to have been read a Second time)committed to the Scottish Standing Committee.

OBSCENE PUBLICATIONS

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Chichester-Clark.]

10.0 p.m.

Mrs. Patricia McLaughlin: It may seem rather strange to say that I am grateful for the opportunity of raising tonight this urgent, important, serious, and to me entirely unpleasant subject—that is the question of obscene publications and where we have failed to carry out the tasks laid upon us to see that this type of publication is not available, particularly to our young people.
In the short space of time of an Adjournment debate, it would not be suitable to go into detail on the various types of arrangements that we have made to try to protect the public. I want to draw attention to the fact that the public is still apparently not sufficiently protected, particularly against the type of obscene publications which have no literary merit whatever. These are the ones with which I am particularly concerned.
I have sent to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary a large number of these publications, and I have an equally large number here. I do not intend to mention any of them by name and give them undue publicity. I can only say that they are the type of publication

which glorifies brutality and bestiality of every kind.
There are, I understand, between 150 and 200 of these different types of publication which are, in the main, imported from other countries and are not published here. This is the first and very important point. They are not in the main published in our own country, although some are. They come in despite all the protections that we have to prevent them coming in and being on sale. They manage to slip through every net that we have laid out to catch them. These are the type of publications in which no decent artist, decent author or respectable photographer would have his work displayed. In many cases they are not even grammatically sound, and the crudity of expressions in them is something to which we have to pay attention as they are now on sale in such large numbers.
They are typical of the general slipping of our feelings in allowing things to be a little more relaxed. Somehow, we have relaxed too much and allowed this type of publication in vast numbers to flood the areas where people live, particularly the closely crowded urban areas, where the young, perhaps in coffee bars, are shown these publications and told the type of store where they can buy them. No reputable bookseller would touch them. They are on sale in places where one has to be in the know about them. The difficulty about this, as one young chap said to me, is that they are exciting, particularly if one is the type of young person who has left school at 15-plus and been thrown into the busy world and who has more chance of getting; this publication. They are exciting in a crude, demoralising and very degrading way. As the chap said, "They are inclined to pander to the beast in us, and we are bound to be excited and to a certain extent stimulated by them."
The difficulty is that despite what has been laid down in our latest Act it is not easy to define what is obscene. We have directions and definitions and powers of seizure, and so on, but despite that there is still a very large trade in this dirty, filthy muck which has no right to be on sale in this country.
We are disturbed about the increase in crime. Look through these books and


see the way in which everybody who is a wrongdoer is portrayed as a great hero, who gets away with it. We are disturbed about crimes of violence. If hon. Members look at these books they will see crime of every type being glorified and made wonderful. They will see peculiarities of every sort, and all the peculiarities of sex, glorified in all ways. There are some horrifying and disgusting things in these books—the whole range of everything that is dirty and horrible is to be found. Then we wonder why our young people should perform the sort of actions that they so often do.
In many respects our young people are wonderful. Many of them, throughout the country, have asked specifically that this type of publication should be banned, and have asked for help in preventing these books being sold and peddled. This is one of the points upon which we must concentrate. We must realise that we have failed so far to close the gap.
There is another aspect of the question which I am not certain is within the authority of the Under-Secretary to answer. If he says that he cannot do so, I shall understand. I refer to the horror publications which are sold in bubble-gum packets. We do not expect to get anything very ghastly in them, but I have here a very rare first set of 55 horror cards, each of which contains some ghastly information. They show 55 different acts of horror and violence—and we do not expect old people to buy bubble-gum. The first card is headed "Panic in Parliament". Its information is entirely erroneous and misleading. A description of the horrifying scene is retailed on the back of the card, but it has nothing to do with anything that has happened or could happen in this House. The second card is called "Death in the Cockpit" and the third card is called "The Human Torch". They glory in brutality of one form or another.
The Watch and Social Problems Committee of the Mothers' Union brought this fact to my notice. Over 70 committees of young people have brought these and other publications to the attention of many hon. Members. They are not all that easy to get hold of. When the people who sell them and make a profit out of them think that the heat is on they move their headquarters and start

up somewhere else. It is all very well to say that the older ones who buy them should not fall for this temptation, but all of us have weaknesses and we all know that once we have taken a magazine like this, or have been put in the position of having one, we are much likely to be blackmailed into taking another, and after a while we are liable to become regular customers.
We must somehow clear this matter up. It is our responsibility. We cannot expect our young people to believe us when we tell them that we believe in honesty and decency, and in helping people to lead a good life, and encouraging them in all the things that are worth while, when, at the same time, we allow so many obviously rotten things to be literally flung at their heads. I hope that we can find ways to alter the present situation, which is daily becoming more serious.
Only today I was told by an air hostess that the number of these revolting magazines that are picked up from the seats of aircraft is quite incredible. I presume this is because the people who come to this country realise that they are forbidden here. In that case, how do they get past the watchful eyes of our Customs officials? I should also like to know if there is any come-back on people who print and publish these things in our own country.
We seem only too seldom to be able to put our laws into action. We must somehow find ways of making them work more satisfactorily. I have been surprised at the amount of interest that this subject has caused among people who are concerned with the welfare of the young—people who are actively concerned in helping them to meet the challenge of this very troubled world, and who know that everything they can do to help them will make them stronger and more able and fit for this world. The things they find most difficult to counteract are the really depraved things that appear in our publications today.
I have no intention of becoming involved in the question whether something has literary merit. According to the 1959 Act it seems to me that these publications will come under Section 4(2) which says that
the opinion of experts as to the literary, artistic, scientific or other merits of an article


may be admitted in any proceedings under this Act either to establish or to negative the said ground.
There is no artistic or other merit in any of these magazines and there could be no argument to suggest that they have any good in them.
A very wide issue is raised here. How far can we interfere in a decent trade without hurting it in order to prevent an indecent trade? I am not clear what is the procedure. If these magazines are deliberately mixed with magazines which are not obscene—and this is often the case—it is hard to trace exactly which is which without countless more inspectors entering premises than we could hope to have. I hope that the Under-Secretary will give me further information about how much has been done to keep down this type of literature and how much further we can hope to go to solve the problem.
If we are to solve it completely we must ensure that the books do not go underground or appear somewhere else under another title. There are almost 200 names of the same type of magazine. I could take the cover from one and put it on another, and it would make no difference. The people who make a livelihood out of these magazines are up to all the tricks of the trade. Can we get ahead of them and prevent them from moving from one place to another or from changing the titles of these magazines? Are we satisfied that we have done all that we could do?
This question have been raised time and again in the Midlands, in the North-East and around London by those who are anxious to see that publications of no literary merit, which are merely disgusting, pornographic and entirely obscene are wiped from our land, but we do not seem to have found ways of doing this.
It would be out of order for me to discuss possible legislation or to suggest that we have not sufficient legislation. I must confine myself to saying that I hope that the Under-Secretary of State will give me some assurance that strong action is taken. We hear of isolated cases, but all too often we hear of numbers of these books being sold regularly without the seller being caught. I have seen these publications myself, and they are easily available all over the country.

I hope that the Under-Secretary will tell us that it is the Government's firm intention to ensure that these publications do not flourish in this country and that there is no place for them on any bookstall or in the hands of any person in this country.

10.12 p.m.

Mr. John Hynd: I do not want to take any of the time in which the Minister will reply to the debate, but I should like to congratulate the hon. Lady the Member for Belfast, West (Mrs. McLaughlin) on taking the opportunity to raise a matter which is prominent in the minds of many Members on both sides of the House.
Like other hon. Members, I have had correspondence from an organisation calling itself "Youth for Decency", with headquarters in Bolton. I do not know how important or how widespread is the organisation, but I am glad to see that some young people are taking steps in this matter.
I hope that the Minister will not ride away on the argument that although we understand the problem, and although the law exists, it is a very difficult question of definition. That will not do. We have read some unpleasant stories in the Press lately about the goings on at certain junior schools. There was a report in the newspapers only this week about a number of girls under the age of 15 or 16 at a junior school who were pregnant, and about boys of 14 and 15 who had been convicted of indecent offences. It is not surprising, in view of this kind of thing going on.
I therefore hope that the Minister will not ride away on such an answer, but will give a positive answer. If his argument is that this is a difficult problem to define, let him at least consider setting up an inquiry within his Department or through some other channels to see what can be done about it and how control can be applied. I do not imagine that these; magazines come into the country in hundreds of thousands through a smuggling operation. They must come in quite openly. We can control this kind of thing in films and in the theatre, and I do not see why we cannot control it in magazines if the Government intend to do something


about it. I hope that the Minister will give us some positive information when he replies.

10.15 p.m.

The Joint Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. C. M. Wood-house): I, too, should like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West (Mrs. McLaughlin) on her initiative in raising this question. She has done a service to the House in bringing it before us this evening. It concerns the sale all over the country today of obscene books and magazines, very largely, as she said, imported. The scale on which it is happening is already a considerable moral and social problem, to some important aspects of which the hon. Member for Attercliffe (Mr. J. Hynd) has drawn attention.
I want to answer my hon. Friend—and I hope that this will satisfy the hon. Member for Attercliffe—by telling the House something of the defences which exist under the law against such material and of the action which the enforcement authorities are taking under the powers available to them.
First, I want to say a word to clarify the role of my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in relation to the enforcement of the law. It should not be thought, from the fact that I am the Minister replying to the debate, that my right hon. Friend is responsible for enforcement. That is a common misconception, and I am glad to take the opportunity to correct it.
As I shall show in a moment, enforcement of the law relating to obscenity is in the hands of the Customs authorities in relation to imported material and of the police in relation to both imported and native material, guided in both cases by the Director of Public Prosecutions but not by the Home Secretary. My right hon. Friend has no ministerial responsibility for the Customs authorities, but my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary to the Treasury is here to represent them.
The Home Secretary has general responsibility for the administration of the local police forces and he is, of course, the police authority for the Metropolitan Police. But he has no ministerial responsibility for police

action in instituting proceedings in the courts, nor powers to give the police instructions as to the way they enforce the law or as to the proceedings they should bring. So I am replying partly in a vicarious capacity because this affects the actions of a number of separate authorities.
My right hon. Friend is concerned to watch the progress in the battle against the flood of pornography, because if the law is not working properly, and amending legislation is required, he would be responsible for sponsoring it. As it happens there have been some decisions in the courts which have revealed defects in the Obscene Publications Act, 1959. I am sure that the House will excuse me from going into detail about those defects, partly because I do not want to draw the attention of would-be traffickers in obscenity to possible loopholes in the law and partly because, if we were to get into a discussion of fresh legislation, we should be out of order.
My hon. Friend has drawn attention to the fact that pornographic magazines and paper-backed books are widely on sale in retail shops although they are not, in the main, published here. This flow, which has grown recently into a flood of cheap and, generally speaking, foully written pornographic books, comes in the main from the United States. It began at the end of 1960, partly because the relaxation of the policy of price restriction on the importation of printed matter made it possible for it to be sent here very cheaply.

Dame Irene Ward: Can my hon. Friend say how long the Home Secretary would consider that he has to wait before amending the law in order to strengthen it?

Mr. Woodhouse: If my hon. Friend will wait, she will get her answer a little later.
The price restriction I was referring to was a wartime measure for economic reasons which could no longer be sustained. It appears that there is a surplus of these books in the United States because in some States obscene literature of this kind is freely printed, published and sold—not, of course, lawfully, but apparently to some extent with impunity.
This surplus, which is valueless on the American market, is worthwhile for British importers to bring at very low cost into this country. It is a profitable traffic in spite of the fact that very large quantities, as I shall show, never get through to the point of sale.
There are two lines of defence against this traffic. The first line is in the powers available to the Customs authorities at the ports under Section 42 of the Customs Consolidation Act, 1876. This Act prohibits the importation of a long list of articles, including obscene articles which are defined in some detail in that Section. There is also the procedure laid down in the Customs and Excise Act, 1952, which provides for the seizure and condemnation of prohibited articles of all kinds.
This work of intercepting imported pornography is carried out, for convenience and economy, by the Customs officers although their primary task is concerned with the assessment and protection of the revenue. The officers cannot and do not devote themselves specially and exclusively to the watch for obscene matter. They rely on intercepting it if it comes to their notice in the course of their general examination of incoming material. As the House will see from figures, they have done pretty well.
Since the beginning of 1961 they have seized and condemned over 1 million copies of repulsive novels and magazines appearing under 1,000 different titles. But the fact that my hon. Friend has managed to purchase some copies shows that a certain proportion of the flood is not dammed at the ports of entry. We therefore come to the second line of defence, which is an attempt to dam it—in both senses of the word—after it comes into the country.
This second line lies in the Obscene Publications Act, 1959, which operates against both imported and native pornography. Section 2 makes it an offence for a person,
… whether for gain or not,
to publish an obscene article, and there is the provision in Section 1, defining the test of obscenity to which my hon. Friend referred. There is also the definition in Section 4 as to justification for publication on grounds of its being in the interest of science, literature or learning or other

merits. But I mention that only to confirm her judgment that this has no conceivable application to the mass of material with which we are concerned tonight.
Section 3 provides a power for the granting by a justice of the peace of a warrant for the police to search premises where there is reasonable ground for suspecting that obscene articles are kept for publication or gain and to seize any such articles. They are then brought before the magistrates' court, which has power to order them to be forfeited if it judges them to be obscene by the test in Section 1. Under this forfeiture power, over 360,000 imported novels and magazines have been destroyed in 1961 and 1962.
There are also a number of cases which are sub judice before the courts now. The number of books covered by these cases amount in the aggregate to over a quarter of a million. I hope that the House will agree that these results show evidence of vigorous action on the part of the enforcement authorities, taken in face of the considerable difficulties to which my hon. Friend referred, and the scale of which will be obvious from the fact that an article cannot be forfeited merely on suspicion. It has to be read by somebody. This is an enormous task, bearing in mind that over 1,000 titles have been involved.

Sir James Pitman: May I ask whether the British Museum does not have some opportunity to check up on this by an examination of the copies? Every book published in this country has to be deposited with the British Museum, and I should have thought that the Museum might very easily have tipped the wink.

Mr. Woodhouse: As far as I am aware, my hon. Friend is right about books published in this country, but the vast majority of the books with which we are concerned are not published here. Although the British Museum's obligation is to receive such books, I do not think that it extends to reading them. This is the task that makes it so difficult for the operation of the law to be fully effective.
My hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West has drawn attention to the fact that despite these safeguards she


is still able to acquire such publications in the shops. This certainly does not mean, as I hope I have sufficiently shown, that there is any question of indifference on the part of the authorities to this filthy traffic. I should like to assure my hon. Friend that the Home Secretary deeply shares the concern that she has expressed and is by no means inactive in face of the problem for the future. I should like to tell the House, without, I hope, needing to go into further details, for a reason which I will explain in a moment, that the resources of the law have not yet been exhausted.

Mr. R. H. S. Crossman: The hon. Gentleman mentioned the number of copies stopped at the Customs. Has he any form of collaboration with the American authorities in trying to stop more than that number? Has he any calculation of the number which got through despite his observations?

Mr. Woodhouse: The answer to the first part of the question is "Yes". This is a matter on which we are in touch with the Americans. The answer to the second part is impossible to give, because one can give it only by catching them all once they are inside the country. The fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West has bought a number, and other hon. Members have mentioned them, show that they get through on a not inconsiderable and a regrettable scale.
Hon. Members will not expect me to reveal this evening the proceedings which the police have in train. As I have said, a number of cases are pending and there will probably be more. I have described some of the proceedings which have already been taken. The figures I have given refer to successful actions on the ground of obscenity.

There is also the problem of violence and brutality to which my hon. Friend referred, and the bubble gum cards. I am told that the police have been in touch with the original issuers of bubble gum cards, who have agreed to withdraw them.
I do not know whether the collection of my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast, West is the same as that which the police have already investigated. Perhaps she will be good enough to pass them on to me. If they have not been investigated I am sure that the police will be glad to look at them.
As for brutality in general, there is nothing in the present law which condemns it, apart from the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act which deals with a limited class of works, and not all the works which some people regard as undesirable would be caught under the existing law. I am certain that we have not yet reached the point where any extension of the law needs to be considered, for the reason that if the law can be adequately enforced in the cases which we now have in mind there is a good chance that the supply from abroad may dry up altogether. I would, therefore, prefer to reserve judgment and not commit either my right hon. Friend or the police tonight to further action until we see how current cases develop.
I believe that the House will be willing to accept the assurance of my right hon. Friend that he is watching and will watch with the closest attention and concern the results of the current activities of the enforcement authorities in the next few months, which I hope will be completely successful.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at half-past Ten o'clock.